End of the Story

Miss Bianca-3
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

By now we always called her Miss B, instead of the full Miss Bianca. Our earless beauty lived for many years. She came in every night for a dish of dry cat food. . I never saw any evidence that she was a hunter. She liked us to stroke when we met her outdoors. W e got a better quality of cat food now that she was an eldercat. She took to sleeping on the hood of the car, and then found places atop boxes to hide and daytime-sleep in the garage. She slept and slept and slept and got thinner and thinner. Our vet said she had nothing treatable, “Old cats can sleep a lot,” she said. Miss B didn’t keep herself quite as cleanly white, but she still looked fine and her yellow eyes were gemlike. So things went on until the day she didn’t come in. For several days we looked and called, but we never saw her again. Our hope was that she hadn’t come to some sort of violent end by teeth of dog or tire of car. And gradually we stopped calling and went on. A couple of years later as S was trimming some ivy near the house, he found a little bit of white fur and curled up skeletal remnants. He came inside and got me. She had gone to sleep in a favored spot, under the dryer vent where she sometimes enjoyed the warm air. She was resting there still, dessicated and odorless, yet undisturbed. She is there yet, deeply quiet, and known, under the ivy.