And then there was the time we found a sorry gray cat
that’d been hit outside _____’s house right down the street
from the café. The animal was so pitiful, our bleeding hearts
couldn’t stand to leave it, so we gathered newspapers,
our hands never once touching any parasites, to maneuver it
off the pavement and the threat of more mangling tires.
The flies hadn’t gotten to be very thick yet, and we lifted
the cat over to the grass, its peridot eye petrified open.
It lay there on _____’s lawn for three days because we didn’t
know what else to do. Later, when we confessed we’d chosen
his house to place the cat until we could find someone to bury it,
he got angry and called us putas; he’d been so afraid a wronged lover
had come to put roots on him. He never suspected the hands of friends
would turn his fate sour. All the bad luck that barreled towards him,
thunderheads in a summer storm, he blamed on us and our dead cat.
Even after we all moved away, even though later we were all
very congenial, _____’s troubles stuck to him like dried blood
on the sagging outer gums of a dead mouth.

-Bianca Spriggs,
How Swallowtails Become Dragons
(Accents Publishing)