The Dead Cat by Whitney Collins

My mother was an amphetamine addict who left me in a gas station bathroom somewhere east of Maniac, Georgia, when I was four. The last thing I saw of her was her hand, held up, not waving but still. Soon after, I was found and taken to a police station and given a paper cup of tepid water and a box of animal crackers. The policeman who sat across from me acted as if I’d robbed a bank. His breath smelled of hot tar, a pothole recently repaired. The phone on the table was the color of a green penny. The officer dialed it twenty or thirty times with a mad, fat finger. It took seven hours, but eventually my stepfather’s stepmother was located.

“Her name is Mrs. Elizabeth Duvall Price,” the policeman said. “She’s very wealthy, so you’re very lucky.”

The policeman took me to his home and gave me to his wife who took me upstairs and put me in a nightgown that still had its tags. The wife had trouble balancing in a squat as she buttoned me up. There were red marks on her upper arm resembling a mattress spring.

The little room where I stayed that night had a round window overlooking the street below. In the morning, an orange tabby lay dead in the road. Its intestines uncoiled from its split middle like a ball of pink yarn. I stared at the cat until my eyes burned. The policeman’s wife came in and asked: “Will you eat eggs? I don’t make children’s food.”

Downstairs in the humid kitchen, I devoured two fried and four scrambled. I drank a glass of milk that tasted off. I chewed a hangnail. I swung my feet under the metal dinette chair. The policeman’s wife watched me until I excused myself. I spent the rest of the day upstairs with a doll I did not like the looks of. I lifted my undershirt and held it to my nipple.

At dinnertime, Mrs. Elizabeth Duvall Price arrived in a copper-colored Cadillac. She parked on the street, far from the curb, requiring local traffic to come to a stop both ways. She wore a pink suit and a plum fedora with pheasant feathers. From the top of the stairs, I heard her declare: “Well! Let me at her!”

I imagined escaping through the round window. I saw myself fall from the second story and bounce in the front lawn like a toy ball. I saw myself roll down the street until I rolled back into the Texaco.

“She’s upstairs,” the policeman’s wife said. “Playing with her new doll.”

“No telling what she’s been exposed to,” the policeman said. “You may want to have her evaluated.”

Mrs. Price appeared at the foot of the stairs. She first frowned, then beamed. “My word!” she trumpeted. “My ward!”

At dinner, the policeman’s wife served boiled potatoes and gray sausages and instant tapioca. She brought an extra pillow and blanket and hand towel up to the little room and placed them on the foot of the small bed. Mrs. Price put her plum hat on one bedpost and her golden wig on the other. She sat down proud and heavy in her girdle and massaged cold cream all around her face. The policeman’s wife looked at the floor and apologized for the plain food she had served.

“This is a hoot,” Mrs. Price said, wiping her face with a tissue until I no longer recognized her. “This is a real adventure we’ve got going on here.” She unfolded the used tissue for her audience to see, a square of beige and red, blue and black. “A lot goes in to being Mrs. Elizabeth Duvall Price.”

The policeman’s wife gave a mousy smile and left. Mrs. Price removed her girdle and bra and stood unashamed in the center of the little room. Her giant breasts hung comedically. The hair of her crotch was visible behind her skin-colored underwear, a fern pressed under tissue paper. 

“Any damage at this point is superficial,” she said. “Money can solve any problem and your most pressing one is clearly your wardrobe.”

Mrs. Price wrestled a silk nightgown over her head. She layered more white cream along her neck and eyes, then got into the twin bed and patted the narrow space next to her. I crawled reluctantly into the cold sheets. Soon enough, she was asleep with her sandpaper leg pressed against my soft one. When her breathing took on the sound of choking, I got up and went to the round window. Under the streetlamp, two rats took turns at the dead cat. I could not bring myself to get back into bed with a woman whose face and hair had been removed, so I slept under the window. The moon was a broken dish in the sky.

The next morning, Mrs. Price and I got into the Cadillac and drove to Atlanta, straight to a fancy shopping mall where a man in a three-piece suit parked the car. I had never been into a store with carpet. Mrs. Price selected a stiff navy dress and tall white knee socks and shiny red shoes that snapped to one side with silver, heart-shaped clasps.

“We’re having shrimp cocktail tonight,” she said. “And champagne for me and Perrier for you and maybe even Dover sole and white asparagus and garlic snails and mint sorbet. We’ll eat all the things on the menu that require their own utensils. Little forks and tiny spoons.”

Mrs. Price had a clerk locate a shiny red purse that matched my shoes. She unsnapped its silver heart-shaped clasp and brought out a seamless one-hundred-dollar bill from her own purse and slid it into my new one. “We’ll also take the rabbit fur jacket and silk pajamas and eyelet panties and a pair of corduroys for pony-riding. I have a push-button pony in Kentucky. His name is County Clerk and he’s the color of steel, except for his dapples which are the color of limestone.” Mrs. Price stopped. She looked suddenly faint. “I never thought I’d have a granddaughter, so I suppose this is why I’m in such a big way.”

The clerk and I did not reply. Mrs. Price, suddenly and visibly decisive, stopped talking and set off. She strode about the store, filling her arms with lace-trimmed ankle socks, ribbed woolen tights, a tartan kilt, turtlenecks printed with hearts and anchors and smiling sperm whales. She selected a sailor’s blouse, an umbrella that opened up into the green dome of a frog’s head, a pair of yellow rainboots, a silver box of spearmint-colored handkerchiefs that were embroidered with tiny wedges of watermelon. “This’ll do, for now,” Mrs. Price finally announced, breathless. “This will get us home.”

She paid with a plastic card. When we were back in the Cadillac with the boxes and bags, Mrs. Price lit a long cigarette and smoked it like she was dying of thirst. I sat and waited in the backseat. I had on the new rabbit coat, and it smelled like dust. It smelled like the place I imagined the rabbits had once lived—a dark hole of crumbling dirt that kept them safe and dry until they were lured out with cabbage and clocked over the heads and spread out and stitched together to make something to make me warm. 

My grandmother started the car. She maneuvered the big car through the big city, talking to herself the whole while. Doctor, pastor, vitamin B, scoliosis. Kindergarten, tennis, piano lessons, Girl Scouts. Hymen. Hymen! Have that checked! Above all else, that. After an hour of circling and murmuring, we slowed in front of an impressive building. I looked out my window. I’d never seen anything so tall.

“Behold!” Mrs. Price announced. “The tallest hotel on the entire planet!”

Before me was a tube of mirrors that reached up to outer space. I crept from the Cadillac. My dress was as stiff as sycamore bark, my shoes as bright as grocery apples. Another man in a suit helped me over the curb and onto a red carpet. I knew then I would never recall my own mother. Not her face or her name. My own birthday was now a mystery.

That night, I sat on the edge of a giant bed in a new flannel nightgown and ate shrimp from a doll-sized pitchfork. Mrs. Price and I looked out the wide window and watched the sunset. We could see snakes of gray pavement below, distant islands of dark pine forest, the demure, pink earth showing its flesh, here and there, beyond the city in naked swaths. The sun melted like sherbet on hot asphalt. Elizabeth continued to present me with foods that were forced to be friends: a ripe tomato stuffed with chicken salad, a piece of green melon wrapped in ham.

“Exorcism is what this calls for in some circles,” she said. “But I’m not in those circles and don’t plan to be. A baptism will suffice. And then: a dental exam, tap shoes.” She gave a little gasp. She touched her napkin to one corner of her mouth. “How do you feel about New Year’s Day?” she said. “As your new birthday? And Betsy,” she went on. “As your new name?”

I said nothing and Mrs. Price glowed. When we were finished eating, she stacked our used dishes on the little rolling table and rolled it right out into the hallway. Then she chose the bed by the bathroom and gave me the bed by the window. Mrs. Price repeated the routine from the night before. Her hair was removed, her bra was removed, her face was removed. There was the hideous fern under tissue paper. There was the lamp turned off. Here came the choking breaths. Here came disgust. 

In the dark that still smelled of clams and coffee, I lay awake, picturing the cat in the road. I pictured it just after it had been hit, when it was still warm, when there had still been a chance. I rolled its intestines back up in my mind, tucked them back into the cat, and zipped it up right down the center, a ball of yarn in an orange purse. I made the cat get up and cross the road. I made it sit down on the sidewalk and give itself a bath with its rough, red tongue. When the cat was clean, I sent it up a tree and into a hollow where I turned it into an owl. “Who?” the owl asked. “Who? Who?”

I climbed out of bed and located the rabbit coat in one of the shopping bags. I put it on, got back under the covers, and fell quickly to sleep. All night I dreamed I was in a burrow. The dry dirt kept crumbling in. Something was digging its way toward me, but I was unafraid. I knew it was my mother. If I stayed asleep a little longer, I knew I might catch a glimpse of her hand.

Whitney Collins is the author of RICKY & OTHER LOVE STORIES and BIG BAD, which won the 2019 Mary McCarthy Prize, a 2021 Bronze INDIES, and a 2022 Gold IPPY. She received a Best American Short Stories 2022 Distinguished Story, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a 2020 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and won the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize and the 2021 ProForma Contest. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Idaho Review, Gulf Coast, Book of the Month Club’s Volume 0, and The Best Small Fictions 2022, among others.

7 March 2025