Milk
Shortly after I moved out of home, I had something odd occur to me that I still don’t fully understand. Whether it was delusions, or just a bizarre dream I can’t say. At the time it felt as real as anything could feel, and yet now, the memory of it has faded into something like the plot of some old tv show that would only be aired at 3 am.
I was living with a friend whose house was literally on the beach. At high tide, you would walk maybe five metres and you’d be ankle deep in water. It wasn’t a public beach; it was used for mooring boats. So, there were a few long wharfs, to which boats could be tied. I did shift work, and I would get home late, so I’d take a walk along the beach to wind down and get ready to sleep.
One night, I saw someone standing out on one of the wharfs. He had a bag in his hand which he casually tossed into the sea. I watched as it disappeared, wondering what was in it. My mind, ripe with paranoia from imbibing horror films, offered up a gruesome thought:
A body.
Can’t be. Wrong shape, not big enough.
Unless it was cut up into pieces.
I tried to shrug it off, but my curiosity took hold and I had to know. I waited until the man was gone, then waded out into the water and grabbed the bag. It was your standard black garbage bag, knotted at the top. I returned to shore with it and sat down in the sand.
It didn’t contain a human corpse. It was a litter of kittens, five of them. Maybe one or two months old, I’m not sure. I don’t know much about cats, but they were furry, and about as big as the ones in a pet shop. I guessed the man on the wharf had a cat that got pregnant and couldn’t offload its offspring or couldn’t be bothered to. So, he’d thrown them into the sea to be rid of them.
If I hadn’t been so indecisive, I might have saved them. But as they were dead, I decided to bury them. About four hundred metres down the beach, the sand hit the bush, so I crunched my way through the undergrowth and dug a hole, about two feet deep, then dropped the bag gently into it. As I pushed the first handful of dirt back, I heard a sound. Sounded like a pixie saying ‘milk’. Or ‘help’.
It was coming from the bag.
I opened it up again, and there poking its head out from its dead brothers and sisters was this one tiny black and white cat, still alive. Not the smallest, not the largest. Only special in the fact that it was breathing. I couldn’t bury it alive, so I scooped it out and dropped it next to me. I buried the rest and walked back, the little cat following me all the way. Once home, I poured it a small bowl of milk and when I laid down for bed, it hurriedly hopped up onto my chest and snuggled in.
In the morning, it was gone. But that night it was back again, by the back door, mewling for milk. And just as before, it snuggled onto my chest to sleep. On it went like this, night in and night out.
Because my friend worked days and I worked nights, we very rarely saw each other, so he never met my little pet, which I’d named ‘Milk’. After a month, a public holiday let us finally catch up. I wanted to introduce him to Milk, as I’d been talking about the little fuzz in passing for a while now, but when I put out the milk for the night, the cat didn’t show up. Nor did it show up the following night, or the night after. It had simply vanished.
Every night, I would walk the beach looking for Milk, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t remember how I got this idea into my head, but I thought to return to the burial site. The earth was still turned as though freshly dug, and it was easy to push it aside and retrieve the bag. I gagged on the smell but urged my stomach to keep my dinner and summoned the courage to open it.
Inside were the dead kittens.
Eyes sunken, skin stretched taught from internal rot.
All five of them, with Milk’s body on top.
For a while after that, I don’t know why, I would place a saucer of milk out on the doorstep. Some mornings it would be empty, some mornings it wouldn’t. It could have just been local wildlife, but it was only empty on the nights I’d woken up, swearing I’d heard Milk’s mewing outside my bedroom door. Of course, when I opened it, there would be nothing there. I missed that cat. I really did.
Over time, my mind ate away at those moments to make them into something more logical, understandable. But I know that little cat had enjoyed my company as much as I did its. I know this to be true because of the memory I still have the most trouble ignoring, it flashes across my mind when I’m laying at bed at night.
When I saw Milk’s cadaver, it had looked straight back at me.
With a cute little grin on its rotten face.