when the cat died, I thought it’d be the end of dust. instead, more piled up. in corners, on baseboards, on the flat fins of the slow spiraling fan. my body was a spore, a fugitive. my own dead cells, my useless hair. I search the static electricity for proof of her life—a whisker, a sliver of fur , the sheath of a claw. it clumps up in my hands, on the bottom of my scaled feet. this home is made of death—skin, debris, fur, domestic dust coats the pad of my finger. what good is the head of a mop that can’t get clean? what good is my meticulous sanitizing routine? oh look, I’m crying again and remembering something far away, disposed of. I entangle under the couch. me and the shell of a pistachio. me and the clipping of a nail. me and the storm. the cat’s invisible tooth, the size of a crumb. altogether, it moves as a single large particle.
~~~Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press) and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Her work has been published in Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, and others. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University.
