Haiku

Cats were supposed to have nine lives, but Toshi had definitely had at least fifteen.  It was like the guy couldn’t stay out of trouble. Zach had spotted him in Japan, a kitten stranded on the median of a busy street.  Zach had basically jumped out of the taxi to save him. 

He wasn’t sure a little kitten like that would even survive the thirty-hour plane trip home, but he did, and grew up into a handsome and fearless warrior. There was the time he fought the raccoon and came home with his forehead gashed open. He fell out of a tree once when he was chasing a squirrel, right in front of everybody, and broke his little white ankle. And then he had sprouted that tumor on his back and the vet said there was a ninety percent chance the cancer had spread, but no, cancer didn’t spread.  But Toshi was old now, old as the hills, a frail old man being slowly laid to waste by, of all the mundane things, diabetes.

Zach found him on Tuesday morning, stretched out in front of the heater even though it wasn’t on, stiff and motionless.  His eyes were closed.  Zach hoped it had been peaceful.

So that was it.  Seventeen good years.  You couldn’t ask for much more than that. 

Zach cried for a minute, as he knelt down over his dead friend, his roommate and family for the last couple decades, but he wasn’t really much of a crier.

He hadn’t thought about what he would do with the body.  He should have been thinking about it, probably for the last few years, but who wants to think about something like that.  Now he knew, though.  It came to him as simple as a haiku.

He went to his closet, reached up into a box at the top where he kept his travel souvenirs, not a lot of them, pulled out the folded Japanese flag.  He wrapped Toshi in it, jumped in the car, and headed for the hills.