This week, instead of a topical blog, I’m posting a short story. Enjoy!

Feeding Bela*

by
Vivian Lawry

Brian empties a can of Fancy Feast into a bowl—the Cod, Sole and Shrimp Feast—and microwaves it for 15 seconds, just to take the chill off. Bela twines around his ankles, tail waving, depositing black hair on his pant legs. Brian says, “Here you go, kitty. Your favorite.” Bela sniffs the bowl and saunters away.

The food is still untouched at dinner time. Anxiety trickles along Brian’s spine. Loss of appetite. That had been the first sign that something was wrong with his gerbil. Brian says, “What’s the matter, kitty? Are you under the weather?” He offers Bela bits of the chicken breast he grills for dinner. All told, she eats half of it, purring and licking Brian’s fingers as she takes each bite. Electric ecstasies run up Brian’s arm and he breathes more easily.

When Brian goes to bed that night, Bela stretches out on his chest, one paw on either side of his neck, her breath soft on his neck. He strokes her silky back and falls asleep, comforted by their routine. But in the fading hours of night, he wakes—clammy and breathing hard—from the nightmare that has haunted him for the last 30 years: Brian’s gerbil, Socks, lies in his cage, panting. Brian picks up the tiny body, wasted to near nothing by days without eating. As Brian watches, Socks grows paper-thin and disappears. Brian always wakes himself shouting, “No! No!” Now he turns onto his side and curls around Bela, but memories of that time won’t be put down.

He’d run to the kitchen. “Mama! Mama! Socks is really sick now. You’ve got to take him to the doctor!”

Mama looked down at him from her great, sad height. “Don’t talk foolishness, Brian. We can’t afford to take a gerbil to the veterinarian.”

“Please? Please!”

Mama frowned and said, “You have my answer.” But then she stooped down and put her hands on Brian’s shoulders. “Son, we don’t have money to take Socks to the vet and put food on the table. It’s as simple as that. If Socks doesn’t want to eat, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Her tone was gentle but Brian felt as though he’d been hit. Socks lived nearly a week longer. Brian tried to feed him milk from an eyedropper but finally Socks rejected even that. During that week, Brian threw-up everything he ate. He felt as though he betrayed Socks with every bite, as if somehow, he was feeding on Socks. Mama said it wasn’t Brian’s fault that Socks died, and he knew it must be true because Mama never lied. But that wasn’t how he felt. Even now, when Brian’s adult brain assures him that it wasn’t his fault that Socks died, his child heart still shudders.

Brian looks at the clock: 4:17 a.m. He tries to turn off further thought, but visions of his Uncle Moses float to the surface of his consciousness. Uncle Moe gave Brian three goldfish for his seventh birthday. He said, “Here’s Eenie, Meenie, and Miney. You’ve already got Moe!” He laughed and clapped Brian on the back, and Brian smiled, too. He took really good care of those goldfish, keeping the bowl clean and feeding them twice a day. When the family returned from a week-long visit with his grandparents, the first thing Brian did was run to the goldfish bowl to say hello to his friends. He found all three fish floating belly-up. Scot, his friend next door, had locked the key in the house the first day and hadn’t fed them after. Scot cried and said he was sorry and his father offered to buy three new fish, but Brian said, “No. No more pets.”

Mama said, “But it wasn’t your fault, sweetheart.”

Brian wailed, “It was. It was. Just like if they were my babies. I should’ve found someone better to take care of them.” He ran to his room and buried his face in his pillow. When his mother again tried to comfort him, when she suggested he get some other pet, he cried harder. “No. I’d just kill it, too.” Brian kept that resolution for three decades.

Now Brian cuddles Bela close to his chest and kisses the top of her head. He’s had her for a year now. “But you’re just fine, aren’t you, kitty? And I’m going to see that you stay that way.”

Bela continues to reject Fancy Feast, then all the other brands Brian buys to tempt her. Soon, he gives up on cat food altogether. Bela gets tidbits of people food at every meal. Her favorites are chicken, bacon, and tuna—always from Brian’s hand. But she also eats pork and beef, ice cream and cheese with gusto, and circles the butter dish on a regular basis. After Brian finds the stick of butter with long striations along the top and Bela’s hair as garnish, he’s careful about the lid to his butter dish. He puts out a separate, uncovered dish of butter for Bela.

After a few months, Bela’s appetite again wanes. Brian takes her to the vet. She’s lost half a pound. The vet can find nothing wrong. He says the weight loss is not serious. But Brian resolves to do whatever is necessary. He orders Dakota organic beef, 6 lbs. for $90, and—to add zest to the more pedestrian fare—Russian caviar at $379 for a 4.4 oz. tin, pleased that he can afford to feed his cat whatever she will eat.

Brian’s girlfriend comes to dinner. Her long print skirt swishes as she walks, her silver bangles jingle. She sits to Brian’s right, tucking a wing of black hair behind her left ear. Bela sits on the chair to his left. When the laden plates are on the table, the first thing Brian does is tear off morsels of cod for Bela. “Here, Bela. Here, kitty kitty.” He makes kissing noises and waves a bit of fish under Bela’s nose, tempting her to follow him. He bends low as he carries the treat to Bela’s eating place in the kitchen—proud of being in control, of not feeding Bela at the table.

When he returns, Delia rolls her eyes. “For God’s sake, Brian. You spoil that cat rotten.”

“Jealous?” He looks at Delia’s silky black hair and slanty eyes and grins. “You shouldn’t be. I love the way you slink around the room, the way you rub against me.” Delia smiles. Bela jumps back up on her chair and Brian scratches her ears before turning back to Delia. “And I never pet Bela the way I pet you.” He cover’s Delia’s hand with his own, gazing into her candle-lit eyes. Bela leaps onto the table. When Brian waves the cat away from his fish, Bela hisses, swipes his hand with her claws, and bites his finger. Brian sweeps her off the table. She yowls and runs under the buffet. Brian shakes his hand. “Damn! What did you do that for?” He brings the injured knuckle to his lips.

Delia says, “Here. Let me.” She lifts his hand to her mouth, kisses his wounds, licks them, then sucks them, all the time looking into Brian’s eyes. She turns his hand over and tickles his palm with her tongue. When she kisses his wrist, his pulse throbs. Her tongue traces a warm, wet path up his forearm. Bela watches, swishing her tail from side to side and growling. As Delia slowly takes off his clothes, exploring his body gently, Brian thinks how soft and smooth her tongue is, how different from Bela’s sandpaper rasp.

Two days later, Brian’s finger is swollen—hot, red, painful. His doctor examines the crusted blister. He presses Brian’s swollen lymph nodes. Brian yelps. He tells the doctor he doesn’t have much appetite, feels feverish, has a headache and blurry vision.

The doctor says, “It looks like cat scratch fever—but it could be the bite. Cats are germy—much worse than dogs. When it comes to germs, cats are right up there with human mouths. Did you sterilize the wound?”

Brian flushes and looks away, remembering that night with Delia. They never did finish dinner. “Uh. Not till the next morning.”

The doctor shakes his head. “You should have sterilized the wound,” he says. “Use a heating pad on the lymph nodes.” He writes prescriptions for pain pills and antibiotics.

Brian goes home feeling like hell. He calls Delia. “Maybe you could come by—just long enough to feed Bela for me.”

She says, “I’ll feed you, too. And make sure you take your meds.”

Brian wouldn’t allow just anyone to feed Bela, but Delia is a certified veterinary technician. He has no qualms about entrusting Bela to her. And, after all, if it weren’t for Delia, he wouldn’t even have Bela.

Brian’s neighbor had asked him to help her take her four Labrador retriever pups in for their shots. Delia came into the waiting room where Brian was playing with two of the pups. She smiled at him. “I can tell you love animals,” she said. “You have caring eyes.” Brian pushed his thick glasses up his nose with his middle finger and looked aside, scarlet creeping from his neck to his cheeks. He couldn’t think of anything to say to this beautiful stranger. She laughed, low and intimate—the sort of laugh that tells a man he’s special—and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Christopher Reeve in his Clark Kent persona?” Brian had heard this many times, but saying he knows he looks like Superman seems arrogant. When he doesn’t answer, she continues, “Well, never mind. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. Your pups are adorable.” After Brian stammered out a denial of ownership, a halting explanation about helping his neighbor, the woman smiled. Brian noticed her white teeth, her full red lips. She said, “My name is Delia. I’m a surgical technician here.” Delia’s pointy tongue darts across her upper lip. “Would you be interested in adopting a young cat? She’s a real beauty.”

Brian smiles, remembering his introduction to Bela, how she stalked the examining room, tail raised like an antenna; how she stretched—chest low, rump in the air—exposing her tightly pleated rosebud. Brian envied her unselfconscious assurance. She was thin but strong, all black except for a white blaze on her chest. Brian asked her name. Delia shrugged. “She was picked up by Animal Control.”

Brian said, “She looks like she’s wearing a white bib. I think I’ll call her Miss Bibbs—or maybe Bibbsie.” He saw Delia knit her brows and realized that he really wanted this woman to like him. “What do you think?”

Delia said, “She doesn’t strike me as a cute sort of cat. I’ve been calling her Bela.”

As soon as he heard the name, he knew Delia was right. “Perfect. Bela she is.”

While Brian’s left hand is useless, Delia comes every day after work, sometimes still in her aqua scrubs when a surgery runs late. She prepares dinner according to Brian’s instructions and then puts food in his hand so he can feed Bela. Brian says, “Thank you, love. You’re very good to us. When I’m up and about again, I’ll make something fabulous—a regular feast for three.”

Delia smiles and scratches Bela’s ears. “That’ll be great.”

But a few days later, Brian has to see the doctor again. His finger seeps foul-smelling gray liquid, blisters and air bubbles dot his hand, and red ribbons wind toward his wrist. The doctor says, “I can’t understand it. The antibiotics should have prevented gangrene.” He sighs. “I’m afraid we’ve got to amputate the hand. Today.”

Brian jerks back. “What?”

The doctor says, “Gangrene moves fast. We have to move faster. If not, you could end up dead soon.”

Brian gulps and tries to draw enough breath to speak. “Well, if you’ve got to. . . .” His mind races and sweat beads on his brow as he imagines how things might go from bad to worse. He thinks, somehow, things are less likely to go wrong if he’s awake. He says, “General anesthetics are too dangerous. Just give me a local. I can take it.”

They go together to the hospital where Delia meets them. Amputations under local anesthetic are so rare that eleven medical students gather round to watch. Delia squeezes his good hand reassuringly. Afterwards, Brian whispers to her, “I want the hand. Can you get it for me?” She nods, and while everyone is involved in examining Brian, suturing blood vessels, and inquiring about his well-being, he sees Delia retrieve the severed hand, wrap it in a towel, and stick it into the waistband of her scrub pants.

Delia takes Brian home before returning to work. That night, she comes to make dinner and cut his food for him. He’s feverish and hasn’t much appetite. Brian says, “Where’s Bela? Usually she’s agitating for hand-outs by now.” Delia goes to the kitchen, calling, “Here, Bela. Here, kitty kitty.”

When she returns to the dining room, Delia looks sheepish. “I forgot about your hand—left it on the counter this afternoon and…well, Bela tore open the towel and ate part of it.”

Brian is startled, but then it strikes his funny bone. He whoops with laughter. “A severed hand isn’t good for much. Why not cat food?”

Delia smiles tentatively. “You aren’t upset?”

Brian shrugs. “I was just gonna put it in a jar and set it on the shelf beside my tonsils and my kidney stones.” Brian grins. “But it’s looking a little the worse for wear now. Put what’s left in the fridge. Bela can have it tomorrow.”

Brian’s stump does not heal well. The doctor refuses to come to the house. Brian refuses to go to the hospital again. He tells Delia, “Once was enough. Anytime you go into a hospital, you risk being attacked by flesh-eating bacteria or something. No, thank you. I’m not pushing my luck.”

Delia says, “You’ve got to do something.”

Brian shrugs. “Why don’t you take a look at it?”

Delia looks at Brian’s stump and shakes her head, clucks, and shakes her head again. Brian looks at her anxiously. “Can you take care of it?”

Delia says, “I’ll do what I can. But if you ever tell anyone, I’ll be in big trouble. Practicing medicine without a license or whatever.” She opens the wound as wide as possible. She scrapes the dead, infected flesh into a stainless steel bowl, washes the wound with cool sterile water and soap. Delia says, “I’ll flood the wound with a 10% bleach solution every two hours. And I’m leaving the wound uncovered so the air can get to it. That’s the best thing.” She sets the bowl of waste on the kitchen counter. Bela stalks the kitchen, tail waving.

Brian drowses, floating in a sea of painkillers. When he rouses, Bela is licking his stump. He feels euphoric—and the rasp of Bela’s tongue on what used to be his wrist is giving him a hard-on. Delia comes in and lifts Bela off the bed. She looks toward Brian’s erection, smiles, and settles into the bed beside him.

A couple of days later, Brian is obviously worse. He turns glazed eyes toward Delia. “You’ve got to do something.”

When Delia comes from work that evening, she brings scalpels and Black and Decker saws, ketamine and valium from the critical care animal hospital where she works. She says, “The ketamine and valium will deaden the pain, but I’ve got to warn you: ketamine is hallucinogenic for humans.” She administers the valium orally and the ketamine intravenously and within minutes, Brian is feeling no pain. While Delia amputates his arm at the elbow, Brian falls into a hole where his body moves in rhythmic waves from head to toe, buoyed on some cosmic ether, his body warping and stretching in slow-motion. He closes his eyes and everything he sees is in intense reds, blues, greens, and yellows. The colors ebb and flow, and he feels the pulsations, a strangely familiar beat beat beating that he finally identifies as Delia’s heartbeat—or maybe Bela’s. When he opens his eyes, he sees Bela from a great distance, no bigger than a grasshopper, thin and flat as paper. Delia looks like a paper doll, too. She touches his chest, her hand silicone—like the only embalmed body he ever touched. Brian can’t tell how much time has passed, but Delia holds a severed lump of flesh. At first, Brian can’t figure out what it is, red and white and wet. Finally, he remembers. He says, “Put it in the fridge. Bela seems to like it.”

Delia takes a leave of absence from work so she can take care of Brian and feed Bela. Bela stops growling at Delia. Delia stops locking Bela out of the bedroom, just moves her over when bedtime comes. Brian is pleased that Delia and Bela have taken a fancy to each other. Delia washes Brian’s stump with sterile saline and the bleach solution, gives him pain pills and antibiotics every four hours around the clock. But it doesn’t do any good. Brian’s third amputation is just at the shoulder. As the ketamine takes effect, Brian feels like he’s dying. This time, the rhythmic moves of his body are side to side. He zooms down and around and up, a carnival ride without the jerks, all the way to other worlds. Delia says, “I’m sorry, love.”

Brian says, “That was a hell of a trip. Thanks. Feed Bela for me.”

Following each amputation, Brian grows weaker. Bela just grows. She gains twenty pounds eating Brian’s jettisoned parts. Her thirty-five-pound body is solid, her black coat sleek. She seldom leaves his room. When she jumps up onto Brian’s bed, he thinks she looks lithe as a panther. At night, Delia curls next to his good side while Bela settles in to guard his wounded side. Brian feels loved and comforted—and proud that Bela is thriving.

Brian wakes in the night, the stench of gangrene assaulting him. By the light of a full moon, he sees grey welts fanning out from his left shoulder stump toward his chest, knowing that in full light, they would show red. He feels the heat of infection. Bela licks his wound. Delia is asleep, her head on his right shoulder. He strokes her hair, her cheek, her back. She rouses. Brian says, “I think this is the end.” He chuckles weakly and adds, “What’s left to amputate?” Delia sobs, holding close to Brian’s chest. He says, “You’ll feed Bela for me, won’t you?”

When Delia speaks, her voice is tearful. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll take good care of her.”

Brian says, “There’s an ax and a saw in the garage. Those, along with what you brought from the clinic, ought to be all you’ll need. Put me in the freezer. I’m still a pretty big man. But when I’m gone—I don’t know what you’ll do. Cope as best you can.” Brian sighs and scratches Bela’s ears. She purrs and swishes her tail and blinks at Delia.

Delia looks over Brian’s chest, her eyes glowing yellow-green. She says, “Here kitty, kitty. Come to mama.”

THE END

*”Feeding Bela” was originally published (without pictures) in Willard & Maple XIII, 2007-08, 91-97

Note: All of these cats are available for adoption from Richmond Animal League. To the author’s knowledge, none of them have a taste for human flesh.