I bottle fed you and your brother when you were four weeks old and your mother had abandoned you. Your brother suffered from seizures; I remember sitting up with him at night, curled in a blanket in my chest, hoping he would snap out of it, praying I didn’t have to do the thing the vet wanted us to do and put him to sleep.

You, you sat on my knee, head cocked, watching Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone battle the dead in Zombieland. You were hyper-focused on it.

Your brother made it, and so did you, and just like your other sibling, Magnus, whom several different vets told me to put down due to his heart murmur, your brother has persevered. Magnus made it to twenty. Your twin is fifteen and counting.

It kills me that you went first. Both of you were so malnutritioned. You looked like kittens in face, if not in weight, right to the end. Your eyes peered into me as we came to your final hours, in a way that Magnus, or Cassie, or Loki, didn’t, who seemed to disappear before their bodies did.

I can barely forgive myself, even though I know it was the right thing to do. I refused to let you suffer the way Cassie did, when we thought she was getting better, recovering, even as it became clearer and clearer that she was not.

Still, we waited as long as we could, gave you every last minute. Like with Cass, we pray we didn’t do that solely for us.

I’m going to miss you, beautiful baby girl. Your brother already does. He just about broke me, standing up on his back paws, his front paws reached out on the glass of the back door as he watched us lower you into the ground.

I’m not a spiritual man, preferring the Degrasse Tyson’s merging atoms to an ever-present afterlife, but your mother has always believed that souls return as animals to visit the people they loved. She talked about you meeting up with your beloved Cassie, with Magnus, now much nicer to you than he ever was in life, with Loki, your fellow white kitty and protector, and Nyka, mother of the brood, and gentle giant.

And as we dug outside, talking about what you might come back as, five freaking blue jays, FIVE OF THEM, came flying in, squawking and carrying on, flitting about our deck and tree, the roof and the fence.

When’s the last time you’ve seen five blue jays together? I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than two. They’re a bit of a lonesome bird.

In that moment, I believed. There is more to this world than dirt and stone. There is love, and pain, and hearts connecting in ways unexplainable by rational thought.

I’m going to miss you, girl, and I pray we’re a long way away from another.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1508 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert Heinlein
Comics: The Scumbag 1-2, Seven To Eternity 14-15
Music: Warpaint, The Black Crowes