UNIVERSES, by A. R. Morlan

She was little more than a soft shape,

clinging to the concrete on First Street North,

frost-glued and unmoving,

save for the faint ripple of fur where

the icy breeze stroked her.

A calico kitten, maybe three-four months old,

car-hit,

disemboweled,

front paws neatly crossed,

eyes shut as if in sleep, pink-tinged lips

upcurled in a secret cat-smile.

At home, my Penny and Heidi were of the same age,

the same rough size, only better-fed,

and alive and warm, still curled in my unmade bed.

How long she had been there, I couldn’t tell—

her spilled insides were stuck to the street,

resisting my efforts to move her,

but her body was still soft to my probing fingers,

her fur still silky,

white with daubs of orange and grey.

She could have been a playmate for my kittens,

I thought as I cried, tears pooling

along the lower rims of my glasses,

while I searched the pre-dawn back alleys

for a scrap of board,

something to scrape her off the street,

while the image of her torn insides

warred with her frozen, enigmatic smile.

Cardboard in hand,

I cried as I struggled to pry her off the street;

Bits of her shell-pink intestines,

some of her fur remained,

a soft shadow,

as I started to slide her into the crinkly white

plastic shopping bag I’d been carrying that morning—

until I paused to take one last look at

the kitten whose life I’d never share,

even as a blur of white-orange-grey

glimpsed running away from me down some alley…

and I noticed how the spirals of her

eviscerated insides resembled a conch shell’s

inner secret spiral,

or the smaller spring-twist of life,

of the DNA chain,

and in the grey, cold time between running time

and eternal cessation,

I realized that this was her time of sharing,

her last gift to whichever human found her

after another human had killed her—

Never again could I look at my cats,

my babies,

as little more than furry bodies,

never again;

not after witnessing the tender universe

of inner being,

the fragile, all-too-easily revealed

mainspring of life once lived.

As I gently folded her into the bag,

I, too,

managed to find my sad, secret smile.