The cat is flattened on the road, its body leaking fluids, organs. A popped eye. They stand around it silent: neither woman knows the cat but it has a collar. Dead without a doubt. Nothing salvageable. Red and fur and pavement. One woman puts a hand to her forehead like she has a fever. She was driving. The other woman was telling a story. A mammogram. A doctor. A dark cold sterile room where results were delivered. Matter-of-fact. Next steps. The driver woman looked to the other woman with a kind of pity, and right in that moment, the cat scampered across the road. She blames herself. She didn’t even swerve. And before the cat and the story and the pity, they were at lunch together. The driver woman ordered sourdough on the side, and the story woman didn’t touch it. The driver woman sighed and spread butter onto bread and passed it to the other woman, but she didn’t eat it. The driver woman sighed again: the story woman was always like this, no bread after ten, no butter. She was watching her figure for health, she claimed. But her health had betrayed her, though the driver woman didn’t know it yet. And before that, they were laughing—both of them—at some silly memory from high school, smoking weed in a parked car at a playground, slipping down the slide afterward. And the sound of their laughter was clear and bright and the afternoon stretched out before them like sunlight as the round orb of it glided from one point in the sky to another, swallowed by the edge of the earth.
