Gangrene

"See I told you Yellow Cat would come home."

"Oh, you promised daddy, and here he is. I'm going to give Yellow Cat a bath, right now!"

"The way that cat smells, you better give him two baths!" the man laughed.

The little girl, carrying her beloved cat in her arms, smiling from ear to ear, swayed past her father headed towards the bathroom. As she walked past, Yellow Cat hissed violently at the old man and struck his paw out at him.

"Yellow Cat! What is wrong with you?" she protested, pulling him back. "You are being such a bad cat!" She carried him on out of the room, suddenly much more in charge and down the hallway to the bathroom.

"That was strange," the old woman said. She had been quietly watching her daughter and husband. "I've never seen that cat do that before. He's usually so gentle."

"Yes. I agree. He must have had a bad couple of days, ehh?" he said. "Well, anyway he is home and maybe now Sugar can stop sulking around the house all day."

"Fix me a glass of tea," he said. "I'm going to sit down and relax. My damn back is killing me. Walking around the neighborhood like that. Ha, I should have my head examined. That stupid cat. I should take it off and dump it on the side of a dirt road someday."

"Yes, you hate the cat. You hate the cat." The woman had bitterness in her voice born from years of listening to her husband's hypocritical commentaries.

"Yes I do hate that damn cat," he said. "Curse the day I brought him home. Nothing but a pain in the ass if you ask me."

"Who asked you," she smirked as she placed a glass of tea in front of him at the kitchen table where he was now sitting.

"Don't get smart with me, woman."

"Oh I wouldn't dare, oh Great One." She chose not to hear, as so often before, the old man's last remark as she turned back to the oven, and dinner.

At first neither the old man or the old woman could fathom the scream they heard rafting down the hallway into the kitchen. They looked at each other in that way that people have of looking in the first few seconds of realization.

"What the hell was th-" the old man began to say but his words were cut off by what was surely the most spine curling scream that he or the old woman had ever heard. A chill shot through the old man's nervous system as he realized that the scream, which was now continuous screaming, was coming from down the hallway, from the lungs of his precious Sugar.

"What in the hell," he said again in a shaking voice as he jumped and ran, pushing the old woman into the door jam and out of the way, down the hallway and into the bathroom. He found the little girl, her screams quickly fading into sobs, on her knees in a pool of water beside the bathtub.

"My God Sugar, what is the matter!" He turned expecting to see his wife standing beside him and not seeing her yelled down the hallway, "Get in here!" but the old woman was sitting in the floor in the doorway between the hall and kitchen sobbing herself now.

Again the old man asked the little girl what was wrong. "Yellow Cat!" she screamed. She looked up, with actual horror in her eyes, "Yellow Cat, look at his leg!"

"What?" The damn cat hadn't even crossed his mind but now as he looked up and saw the cat perched up on the shower caddie, soaking wet, dripping, shaking, one of his hind legs dangling as if hurt in some way-the old man started to understand somewhat, if not completely.

The man stood there with his arms at his sides, hands wide open and turned up in the classic mode of a man not sure as to what to do or say next. The little girl was now sobbing quietly with her arms wrapped around her father's legs. The old lady was now up, and behind the old man in the doorway of the bathroom. A low, not purring, but almost growling sound was drifting down from the cat who, the old man noticed had the look of total terror in it's eyes.

All this had taken only a minute; the first scream, the dash down the hallway, the slow building understanding of what had happened. Only now, his wits returning, did the old man bend down to pick the little girl up from the floor.