Oedipuss and PLatypuss

ONE EXTREMELY SHITTY day, Leda’s mom took Platypuss to the vet in the morning, and Platypuss never came home.

“I’m so sorry,” Leda’s mom said. She was crying but she wasn’t angry, which was confusing. Lately crying and angry were the same thing for Leda’s mom.

“There was a tumor in her stomach,” she said. “That’s why she stopped eating. They said she was in a lot of pain and that there was nothing they could really do, and that we needed to put her to—”

She scrunched her face and bit her lower lip until she could talk again.

“I just figured it would be better if they did it right away, but then when it was over I thought, oh, no, you and Freddy didn’t get a chance to say—”

Her face crumpled all the way. Her thin hand moved to her forehead and she gripped her face by the temples.

Leda looked past her sobbing mother at the bookshelf behind her. There was a new altar on the top shelf. It had started when they first moved to the apartment: an enamel bowl of Chinese good-luck trinkets, a framed photograph of the wedding of Leda’s grandparents in their red robes. Then new additions as the weeks went on. Vases with dried flowers. A small painted tray holding polished rocks. The picture of Leda’s mom’s favorite cousin in Taiwan who had died young of kidney disease.

On the floor in front of the bookshelf, Platypuss’s sister Oedipuss was sitting upright, looking at Leda with wide, uneasy eyes.

Poor kitty, Leda thought. She’s got no idea what happened.

She reached her arms out to hug her mother. Under Leda’s tentatively embracing arms, her mother stiffened, contracted into herself like a slug poked with a stick. It felt like she was hugging herself inside of Leda’s hug.

The crying got harder, more pathetic. Leda began counting things. Seventeen days since she started high school, twenty-three if you included weekends. The signs of the zodiac were, in order, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius. Eighteen months since her parents sold the house and Leda, Freddy and Mom had moved into this apartment that felt like a hotel with its cream and salmon décor, the fireplace mantel without a fireplace. The apartment where Leda, for the first time in her life, had to share a bedroom with her brother. That was another thing that made it feel like a hotel.

She counted the times she could remember hugging her mother. Three times. Getting dropped off on the first day of kindergarten was one. Then on Leda’s seventh birthday, when her mom was just in a really great mood for some reason. And then now.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Leda said, patting the thin, rigid shoulders under her hands.

“You didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Leda’s mom sobbed into her neck.

Leda wanted to be upset about it, too, but there was only really room for one of them to be.

Leda cried each day after that, but only in the shower. She couldn’t cry at school, because everyone would think it was stupid to cry over a cat. And she didn’t want to cry in front of her mom, who’d gone back to her more usual state of being angry: at the vet for not recommending that Platypuss go home to let the kids say goodbye, at Leda’s father for abandoning his pets after the divorce, even though it had been obvious there was no way she was going to let him take the cats, and anyway he was terrible with animals.

Normally she would cry in her bedroom, but now she shared that with Freddy.

So she took extra-long showers each night. Protected by the water and steam, she could sob until her eyes were red, thinking of Platypuss’s deep golden eyes, her soft black fur, how it always felt like bunny fur to Leda when they snuggled after school. That bunny fur was what she wanted now, to breathe in the laundry smell along Platypuss’s tiny ribcage, the baked-bread smell of her fuzzy belly.

When she couldn’t cry anymore, she’d get out of the shower, dry off and get into bed. Then she would just lie there, trying to ignore the flashing light of Freddy playing Brittle Fortress on the TV, the emptiness where Platypuss’s weight was missing from the foot of the bed. Eventually she’d take one of the THC gummies from the tin under the mattress. Her friend Maddie bought them on the internet, because Maddie’s parents didn’t look at what she got in the mail. One gummy pretty much knocked Leda out cold. She didn’t like to take them except for emergencies, since they gave her crazy dreams and also made her feel stupid in the morning. 

Your cat is part of you, Leda thought. When you lose your cat, you’re not the same person anymore.

Sometimes she tried to pet Oedipuss. She had always been a bit snooty and self-involved, and she and Leda weren’t especially close. She was sleeping a lot, probably more than usual though it was hard to tell with a cat. It was the only potential sign of disturbance; otherwise, she seemed to be take her sister’s death remarkably in stride. No searching the apartment, checking Platypuss’s usual spots, the chair by the window, the bottom corner of Leda’s bed. Just a lot of lying around in a ball like usual, her fluffy calico head tucked between the little white mittens of her hind paws.

Leda ran her fingers over Oedipuss’s soft side, flattening the tufts of orange and dark gray. Platypuss would have purred in her sleep, would have curled into Leda’s hand, trying to increase the surface of contact. Oedipuss just lay there as though no one was touching her, too caught up in her own dreams to notice Leda.

Platypuss’s ashes appeared in a box on the altar the next week, in a wooden box, a sprig of dry flowers lain decoratively on top of it. Leda might not have noticed it, except it had a little silver placard on the front that glinted when the afternoon sun hit it through the blinds. The placard said Platypuss. When Leda flipped the box over, there was a sticker on the bottom that said, Animal remains: do not ingest.  

And then, there was something else new. Oedipuss had taken up a vigil. She sat at the foot of the bookcase, tucked into a little square loaf. All day she sat there, unmoving, staring with sad green eyes at everyone who walked by.

Leda couldn’t stand to see her sitting there like that. They’d never been particularly close, but certainly they had history. Leda’s whole life history in fact; Oedipuss had always been there, a year older than Leda, a wise if aloof elder sister. In all that time, Leda had never seen her act like this.

Leda kneeled in front of her, tried to pet her head, but Oedipuss shook her hand off.

“I know, Oedipuss.” Leda lay down on the carpet so they could see eye to eye. “I’m sad, too.”

Oedipuss locked eyes with her like she wanted to tell her something important. Her mouth moved, the unmistakable mouth-shape of the word meow, but no sound came out.

“Oedipuss isn’t sad,” Leda’s father said. “Her brain is the size of a walnut.”

It was Leda and Freddy’s weekend at his apartment. Always an awkward weekend, Leda and Freddy sleeping in the guest room as though they were guests.

Leda didn’t exactly know why she told her dad about Platypuss, except that she had been his cat, too, for thirteen years until the divorce. Leda’s parents had picked Oedipuss and Platypuss from a litter of kittens, right when they moved in together. Two fluffy kittens, a basic black and white one and a fancy splotchy calico. It seemed like he should know what happened.

“Oedipuss is just sitting in the living room by where the ashes are,” Leda said. She didn’t mention the altar. “She won’t move from there. I’m pretty sure she’s, like, in mourning.”

“You shouldn’t anthropomorphize her,” Leda’s father said. “That’s a fallacy. Human beings are capable of a broad range of emotions that animals don’t experience.”

He sat next to Freddy on the couch, thumbing through a book like he really wanted to be reading it instead of talking to Leda about dead cats. Freddy was staring dead-faced at his phone. He hated dad weekends even more than Leda because he couldn’t play Brittle Fortress. There was no TV at the apartment, and even if there was, there was no way Leda’s dad would let him attach the console to it. Leda’s dad called video games a waste of neurotransmitters.

“I’m really sorry about the cat, Leda-Pida.” A grim smile of sympathy spread over her father’s face, like someone had suddenly reminded him how humans were supposed to behave.

Leda watched him turn back to his book, her dad and Freddy looking suddenly just alike, even though one was tall and pasty and the other small and brown.

Oedipuss was in the same spot at the bottom of the bookshelf when Leda and Freddy got back to on Sunday night.

Where the hell did you go, her frowning face seemed to ask.

Leda lay down next to her on the floor. She stretched her hand out to pet Oedipuss’s orange head, then pulled back as Oedipuss shrank away from her fingers, nose wrinkled.

“I’m not anthropomorphizing you,” Leda said. “I mean, we’re both animals. It’s not a fallacy that we could both feel the same thing.”

Oedipuss twitched her whiskers and stared at Leda like she wanted to say something but couldn’t.

It was three in the morning and Leda was awake, staring at the ceiling. Lights off, the blankets pulled up over her head. Freddy barely slept anymore so that didn’t help. Even through her blanket cave, she could see the TV flashing. Low, creepy lights for monster attacks, bright bursts for explosions.

She popped an extra THC gummy into her mouth and dragged her blanket into the living room. The couch was leather and bad for sleeping on, but at least she was alone. There was a crack of light from under her mother’s door. Either she was sleeping with the lights on, or she was awake, which meant all three people in the house were awake in the middle of the night. Leda covered her face with her arms, closed her eyes. The leather of the couch was cold against the exposed skin of her shoulder and feet.

It’s because Platypuss is missing, she told herself. That’s why she couldn’t sleep. Her cat was gone, and the universe was out of order. The living room felt empty, like what was usually the atmosphere had been replaced with a cold, icy void. Her ribcage felt heavy, stuck. She breathed deep through her nose, the stinging chill air, but her lungs wouldn’t expand.

Something was sitting on her chest, she realized.

She pulled her arms off her face and looked down towards her feet. Two round, green eyes looked back at her from a patchwork of orange and gray.

The eye contact was so intense that Leda closed her eyes to shut it out. She felt something rush by her face, a burst of air, a tickle of fur. The oh-so-delicate prick of a single claw piercing the skin of her cheek.

“Hey!”

She sat up hard. Oedipuss scuttled down Leda’s body, landed on her lap. She jumped down to the floor, where she sat upright, arms neatly in front of her body like pillars, scowling at Leda.

“Sorry,” Leda said. “But you started it.”

“You started it,” Oedipuss said. Her voice was low and raspy, something surprising about it, not what Leda had expected to hear.  

“No, you did.” It seemed so odd that Oedipuss was even arguing about this, when she was so obviously in the wrong. “You stuck your claw in my cheek!”

“You closed your eyes at me,” Oedipuss said. “That’s way worse.”

Leda rubbed her face up and down a few times. Now that she thought about it, she was pretty sure Oedipuss had never talked to her before. In fact, even Platypuss had never talked to her, and they were super-close.

“Are you supposed to be talking?” Leda asked.

“Of course,” Oedipuss said. “You’re just not supposed to be understanding me.”

Oedipuss lifted her paw to her face, bit a few times at the tufts of fur that sprouted between her toes. So smug, Leda thought. Then she reminded herself that Oedipuss was just a cat. A cat whose sister and only feline companion had died less than two weeks ago. Leda was forgetting her manners.

“I’m really sorry about, um.” Leda didn’t know how to phrase this to a cat. “Your loss.”

“Likewise.” Oedipuss looked uncomfortable, like she wasn’t quite sure of the etiquette, either. “I mean, actually, we don’t think of it that way.”

For a moment they stared at each other, cat and girl. Leda couldn’t tell if the awkwardness was about death, or because people and cats didn’t usually talk to each other, or because their relationship just wasn’t that close.

“What way?” Leda asked.

“A loss,” Oedipuss said. “That’s sort of a human way to frame things.”

“How would you frame it?”

“It’s a change of state,” Oedipuss said. “Nothing to be upset about.” 

“Really?” Leda asked. “But you’ve seemed really upset. The way you’re sitting by the book shelf all day.”

“Well, that’s a whole other issue,” Oedipuss said. “That’s because you’ve got my sister in the cage.”  

What cage? Leda didn’t remember any cages.

“You mean the ashes.” Leda asked. “The box of ashes, right?”

“What is your mother doing with those?” A full-body shiver started at Oedipuss’s dark tail, rippled over her ribs and up to her orange shoulders. “My sister’s body, in its time of transition? Why does she want it on the bookcase?”

“It’s a way to remember.” She looked at the altar, the faded pictures in their shiny metal frames. She kind of understood what her mother was doing, even if they’d never spoken about it. “When somebody is gone, we like to have something to hold on to them.”

“They’re not gone,” Oedipuss said. “I mean, where do you think they went?”

“They’re dead,” Leda said. “Gone is a nice way of saying dead.”

“What’s with you guys and holding on to things?” Oedipuss said. “Have you ever seen another animal with so much crap? I mean—”

Oedipuss craned her small head to scan the living room, everything Leda’s mom had taken after the divorce. Not much: a shelf of books, the Chinese figurines on the mantle over the imitation fireplace. A few board games and blankets, a stack of DVDs, some shoes.

Then, with a sudden, frantic movement, Oedipuss began to lick her back. One of those crazy cat maneuvers, like, oh, while I’m looking behind myself anyway, might as well just—

Leda watched from the other end of the couch, wondering what it felt like to twist so far you could lick your own spine. The rhythmic strokes of tongue over fur, the damp flattening of orange and tan and black tufts. It looked like paint strokes, like Oedipuss was using her tongue like a brush to paint herself into existence.

“What were you saying?” Leda asked, finally.

“Sorry.” Oedipuss’s face spread into a giant yawn that showed the pink roof of her mouth with all its little ridges. “Can’t remember.”

This is why you shouldn’t talk to cats, Leda thought. Of course they couldn’t own things, crap as Oedipuss called it. They couldn’t even maintain a train of thought past a simple turn of the head. Out of sight, out of mind. No sense of object permanence, no plans for the future or nostalgia for the past. That was also why you never saw a cat constructing a building or writing a book.

She closed her eyes and thought about what that would look like. Oedipuss in a tiny yellow hard-hat, hammering nails with a cat-sized hammer. Oedipuss typing on an old-fashioned typewriter with her little white paws.

“Don’t fall asleep.” Oedipuss jumped on to Leda’s chest. “You need to put my sister into the earth.”

“The earth?” Leda opened her eyes again, even though she really wanted to keep them closed, to drift off into visions of enterprising cats with their adorable miniature tools.

“For her transition,” Oedipuss said. “She needs to move on to her next state. Do you have something like a forest around here?”

“There’s parks,” Leda said. “Would that be good enough?”

Oedipuss wrinkled her forehead, white whiskers quivering.

“Parks have trees?” she asked.

Leda nodded. It occurred to her that Oedipuss had never seen a park. “Lots of trees,” Leda said. “Redwoods.”

“Okay, perfect,” Oedipuss said. “Put my sister in the ground by one of the trees.”

Leda nodded and closed her eyes, put one arm over her face.

Oedipuss yowled like a tortured baby.

“Shhhhh!” She tried to cover Oedipuss’s mouth with her hand. Oedipuss scooted backwards, down to Leda’s legs. “What, what is it?”

“The park!” Oedipuss said.

Leda shook her head. Cats didn’t understand how anything worked.

“In the morning,” she said, closing her eyes again. “You aren’t supposed to go parks at night.”

“There’s no such thing as at night. Every second in the cage is screwing up her transition.”

Oedipuss walked back up to Leda’s chest. Leda could feel the tiny paws searching for holds like Leda was a bumpy hiking path, sharp claws digging into her skin.

“Now!” Oedipuss hissed.

Leda walked the dark streets in her flip-flops, hood pulled up, arms wrapped around her torso. Thirty-five minutes, listening to the pat-pat-pat of her shoes on the pavement, the chug-chug of her backpack bouncing behind her, the buzz and whir of plants and fungi and bugs.

The bus wasn’t running yet, and there were closer parks, but not for burying Platypuss. This was her magical redwood grove, the one she’d hidden in with Alisha every after day after elementary school, plotting the overthrow of their enemies. If Platypuss was going into the ground, this was the place.

She dug with a stick, mostly, a nice big one she’d found on the street, a good inch in diameter. It worked pretty well, but she had to use her fingers to pull out little stones and broken pieces of concrete. She was able to make a good-sized hole next to her favorite tree, the redwood with the star-shaped base that Leda and Alisha used to use as a throne, leaning back into its indentations, coming away covered in auburn fuzz. Now that indentation would protect Platypuss from the elements, make sure she grew right up into the tree, so Leda would always know right where she was.

When the hole was a little over a foot deep, Leda took the box from her backpack. She turned it over in her hands a few times, running her fingers over the bland wood grain, scared to open it. She wondered if the ashes were loose in there, would come exploding out when she opened the box. But when she finally slid the bottom panel open, there was a plastic bag inside.

Something like concrete in there. Leda’s cat, who used to be so soft. Now she was dust, pebbles, little hard pieces. What are those hard pieces, Leda wondered. The thought made her spin, made the trees around her whirl into a dizzy blur.

My sister’s body, she remembered. She needs to be in the ground.

She took a few deep breaths through her nose, pulled the bag out from its wooden cage. Held the bag in her hands for a moment, trying to warm the ashes with her hands. Then she poured them into the hole. They piled up slowly, a soft sound like rain, falling onto each other until they filled the hole a third of the way up. It felt too awful to put dirt on them, so she dropped in nice things Platypuss would enjoy: redwood fronds, dry grass, dandelion leaves.

Then she added the dirt. She liked how it poured over the greenery, filled in the little holes and crevices, a safe reverse-bed for her cat. She found a handful of stones to place on top, five of them, jagged and gray with glistening white striations.  

Her phone said five o’clock. Once the first busses were running, it would only take fifteen minutes to get back home. She would need to clean herself up, wash the dirt and sap and bits of ash off her face and hands and fingernails, put the ash box in its place on the bookshelf, empty now between the trinkets and photographs. She broke off a piece of the digging stick, put it in the box. Added dandelions, redwood leaves, small pebbles and dirt, until the box was almost as heavy as before. Then she slid the box closed and stuck it back in her backpack.

She leaned over the soft dirt and the five stones. She wondered how long until the stones got kicked out of place, until the earth hardened over. Then she wouldn’t know exactly where Platypuss was anymore. Maybe Platypuss wouldn’t really be there, anyway. She was making a transition. She was going to become part of the ground, and then the trees. And then she would be part of the bugs that ate the tree and the birds that ate the bugs and the little mushrooms that sprung up from the earth. And the spores in the air, and the girls that breathed them in.

“Goodbye, my love,” Leda whispered to the soft earth, but she knew it wasn’t really goodbye. 

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