FATCATMANIA
A year ago he died and became very dead and I’ve never once used the phrase passed away, saying passed away fast three times sounds like an Italian fast food chain, I recently stumbled into a Dolly Parton tribute concert that happened to take place in a church and so there was a little less Dolly a little more priest saying, When you explain grief to children, you sometimes say that it’s stripy, and that it’s easy to get stuck on one of the dark stripes, every priest’s special interest being death, but then, eventually, you move along to a lighter stripe, and then back to a dark stripe, and so on, the past year was just that, an overweight stripy cat, wherein the funeral was its darkest and lightest and obesest stripe all at once, all of last February spent just stomping between them, the priest now changing the subject, In case of a fire, there are four emergency exits, sitting in the pews thinking about how often we were mad together, also at each other, percentage-wise mostly the latter, I started stomping between the goddamn stripes again though I hadn’t done it in months, the priest still banging on about fires, The assembly point is by Mr. Cake, a made-up cartoon strip making me laugh, the congregation standing outside of Mr. Cake, freezing, the priest inside buying a slice of a three-tier red velvet cheesecake, eating the memory of a dream I had right after he Pasta Way, I was out in the cold somewhere, he suddenly appeared, he handed me not one but two jackets, he smiled, I woke up, shivering, allergic to my piece of shit stripy grief metaphor cat, who’d started gnawing away at my cranium.
ALICE MADDOCK: