HAUNTINGS: There Once Lived a Woman Whose Cat Died in Winter

By Marissa Castrigno

There once lived a woman whose tabby cat died in winter. The ground was frozen solid and covered in a thick snow, so that the woman could not dig a grave in her yard. She went into town and asked anyone she met what she should do, fretful that her other cats would become cannibalistic before too long. They hunted mice and birds and even chipmunks, but were often hungry in winter.

“Build a very big fire,” said one man, “and turn the cat to ash.”

“Was he sick?” asked another. The woman didn’t think so. “Turn him into stew and have him for yourself!”

“If you store him in the packed snow he’ll keep until spring,” said the grocer. “Then you can dig a grave in your yard.”

The woman thought that was a genius idea and rushed home to begin.

Wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf and wearing thick gloves, she went out behind her house into a deep snow bank. The bare trees rattled all around her, swaying like giant skeletons against a very gray sky. Knelt down, the woman pressed and pressed until she made a small catacomb in the snow bank.

“This won’t do,” she said. “As soon as I go to bed, any old fox could steal him away.”

She tried to fashion a door out of snow and ice.

“This won’t do, either,” she said. “He’ll be so well hidden that I won’t find him again.”

The woman took her dead cat into the cellar, where she put him in the ice box beside her sausages and steaks and some sweet pastries. 

“Now he’ll be safe,” she said, satisfied.

The next day, like every day, the woman bundled herself in coats and hats and strode into town. She was a bit lonely in her house, which is why she kept five cats (now four). She liked to talk to the grocer or the postman or the shop clerk. She drank coffee and read the news. She sent postcards to friends in far off places. She bought balls of colorful yarn, which she let her little cats play with as she knitted, even though it was very inconvenient to her crafting.

When she returned home, she found her gray cat tucked under the sideboard, dead. This one was much younger than the first, and the woman was quite shocked to find him stiff as a plank. She cried out and ran to the vet, who could find nothing wrong with her cats, living or dead. No mites or bites, no runny noses or drippy eyes, no huffing or puffing of any kind.

“I’ll have to do an autopsy,” he said.

“No, no. I can’t bear the thought of it.”

The woman thanked the vet and sent him away with some coins. She put the dead cat in the ice box in the cellar alongside his dead friend. She went to sleep, bereft.

On the third day, in the morning, the woman came in from brushing away snow off her front step and opened the closet door to hang her coat. There on the shelf was her black cat, stretched out atop a pile of scarves, dead as a door nail. The woman cried and cried and asked God, what she had done to deserve this?

“I’m cursed!” she sobbed, as she trudged down to the ice box.

She called her daughter, who lived in the country.

“You won’t believe what’s happened,” she began. She recounted the story over the crackling line. “No mites or bites, no runny noses or drippy eyes, no huffing or puffing of any kind,” said the woman. Her daughter, too, was at a loss.

“I wish you lived closer so I could come, but also the children have fevers,” said the woman’s daughter. “Get some rest, Mama, and perhaps tomorrow will be better.”

The woman made a cup of tea and thought fondly of her three dead cats, departed souls, whose bodies endured in the cellar. She fell into a deep sleep at that lasted all through the night and most of the next day. It was nearly supper time when she rose and saw fresh snow and icicles at her window. Beside the radiator in his favorite spot was her ginger cat, dead and gone. It was too late in the day to call anyone, and after the woman put this fourth cat in the freezer, she began to search the house for signs of evil spirits or witches, though she had no idea what she should be looking for.

She scoured every inch of every surface, looking for clues. Every jar was turned, every rug lifted, until the woman was inspecting a bent fork, wondering what it might mean. It was after the clock struck midnight that she finally sat to rest. At the foot of the sofa, she found the lifeless body of her fifth and final cat. Delirious with grief and her suspicions reignited, she set out to scour the house a second time.

On the morning of the sixth day, the vet offered to conduct an autopsy, but what was the point? Now all five of her cats were stacked in the ice box in the cellar, next to the sausages and steaks and some sweet pastries. A phone call from her daughter bade the woman to travel into the country. She took steaming pots of soup with fresh vegetables and chicken and dill, and went off to tend to her family. She stayed there several days, bathing the children in cool water to help their fevers and making kettle after kettle of tea. Her daughter felt very sorry for her, and felt sorry for calling her away to help them when she had suffered so much. But the woman insisted it was a relief to be with them, to have so many tasks to busy herself. She felt useful. While her patients slept, the woman knit five little matching blankets.

 On the tenth day, when her daughter and her grandchildren were all up from bed, without fevers, freshly washed and in clean clothes, the woman knew her work there was done. Winter, too, had broken, and the sky had grown bluer and the air more mild. The woman hugged and kissed her family and went home.

 Everything was just as she’d left it, though a few plants needed watering. In the yard, the snow had begun to thaw and the woman saw that soon she would be able to dig her graves. Her sadness returned, and she longed to hear their mews and purrs once again. She cried through the evening and then went to bed.

            When spring came, the woman readied five little coffins with five matching blankets, knitted with the same yarn the cats had once batted here and there. She descended the stairs into the cellar, and stood before the ice box. When she lifted the lid, she saw her stacks of sausages and steaks and sweet pies sitting neatly to one side. The cats were gone.

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Marissa Castrigno is an MFA student at UNC Wilmington, where she’s been the nonfiction reader for Ecotone Magazine. Her work has appeared in Memoir Mixtapes and Lavender Review, both prose and poetry.