nina ovenbird Everyone who moves into the co-op is told to keep their cats indoors. The night is ruled by roving gangs of raccoons (not to mention the pack of coyotes wandering the marshlands) and more than one pet has met a sorry end. The evidence turns up sometimes, grisly warnings written_in_bone. When we dismembered the corpse of a rotting tool shed on a hot August day two summers ago the earth coughed up a tiny skull, some scattered bits of spine, and a collar that was eerily preserved. The tag read only “Nina.” Some minor sleuthing unearthed the tale that matched the bones and I learned that Nina was a small tabby who belonged to a family that hasn’t lived here in years. She disappeared twenty years ago and her people never knew what happened to her. “It was a bad year for raccoons,” I am told by a long term resident. “They’ll attack small animals and drag them away. There were nights when we could hear cats screeching as the raccoons tore them apart. You never want to hear that sound. It’s the most horrible wail.” It’s probable that Nina was injured in a fight with a resident raccoon and crawled under the tool shed to die. I took her skull home, set it on my desk, and painted a watercolour study. I could almost feel her ghost curling around my ankles while I did it. The family was notified and the remains were eventually buried in the cemetery of a local cat sanctuary. I wondered, as I contemplated the bone bowl where her hunting mind once prowled, why Nina didn’t go home to her people in her injured state rather than creeping under the tool shed. Maybe she could have been saved. Or maybe she knew that her trauma ran too deep and she couldn’t face seeing her death reflected in their faces. We’re all guilty of that sometimes. We smile_on_the_outside while bleeding internally. We hide contusions and compound_fractures and bellies bowing outward from the weight of blood and we drag ourselves into the dark to scream into the dust mite ridden recesses of our mouldering pillows. It feels too vulnerable to lay ourselves bare on the doorstep of an imagined friend who is just as likely to crush the last glint of light from our eyes as tend to our seeping wounds. Sometimes indifference is worse than death, so we choose the damp embrace of worm riddled clay collapsing in around us. Joy is meeting someone who holds the needle steady, who brings the point to torn flesh, and never flinches. 250618 what's it to you? who go blather from