My black cat, Squid, died on a Formica table, shrunken, his eyes yellow with quick sickness, his fur like wet nettles piercing his skin. Squid’s head jerked unnaturally, wrapped in towels like some necessary puppet, the vet’s left hand working Squid’s limbs from beneath the table: Squid took a departing bow. In the doctor’s right, the syringe—a merciful head-clubbing sleep. I cried, oddly, finally, for my grandmother dead then ten years; her last three spent shuffling, being shuffled, soon carried to the toilet; her dignity, long dropped, brittle leaves underfoot round her skeletal trunk.

I recall sitting her down on the upstairs toilet with force. She was the weight of one wet dog. Her scabrous arms draped along my shoulders, her white hair, like strings, caught in the hinge of my glasses, knotted round my knuckles. My hands pulled like a puppeteer’s, wrestling a life-size doll. I might’ve done many things. What I did—I turned my head away as she opened her robe, and I wrung her loose gray bloomers down her thighs, knees, to the ankles, smelled her urine and was disgusted, as she blankly spoke of a long-buried governess who had insisted that she use “the salad fork for salad.” My grandmother spun so slowly the paper roll and asked if I knew her name, and would I tell I to her.

I said, “You’re my grandmother.”

Squid’s eyes twitched, then closed as if X’ed like in cartoons. My nose filled with his yellow life leaving him, sucked upward by the plastic exhaust fan beside the florescent light.

The doctor touched my hand, he said, “Crying is fine.”

I said, “Tell that to my wife.”

“And what’s her name?”

I was dumbfounded; this man was no man. I wiped my cheek, “She’s my wife.”

From “The Garbageman” series.