Dead Cat

I wrote in an earlier post that I couldn't bury a dead cat. Here is what happened.

One day while my oldest was out mowing the yard, I went out to check on his progress. I smelled something rotting. You all know the smell I'm writing about. The sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. Since I was near the condensing unit of our air conditioner, I figured a small critter crawled in there and either was zapped, or chopped up by the fan. I gave the cut signal to my son, and asked him if he smelled the stinky in the A/C unit. He said it wasn't in there, it was actually the dead cat by the road.

If any of you have ever been to Florida in the summer, you know how hot, and muggy it gets here. Decomposition does not take very long to start after the moment of death. Apparently the night before, or two nights before, a cat was hit by a car near our yard. The cat was either knocked close to our fence, or it dragged itself there before the lights went out.

I followed the smell to the cat, and saw the Tabby stretched out, with flies buzzing about. I walked to the garage, grabbed a shovel, and headed back to the task at hand. I dug a hole within the boundaries of the yard to serve as the Cat's final resting place. What comes next, is what went wrong, terribly wrong.

As I scooped the cat onto the shovel blade the smell went nuclear. I mean it permeated into my pores. Then goo started to leak out of the underside of the cat. Apparently all of this gore was hidden by the ground. Retch, retch, and retch is all I could do. The shovel and cat dropped back to Earth. I had to get as far away from that cat, and it's smell, as I could. I dry-heaved the whole way, with my son following suit.

Remembering something I read about search personnel using Vick's Vaporub to mask the smell of bodies. I went into the house, and found my wife looking at me with a very disapproving look in her eye. Apparently she was watching my burial fiasco from the window. I explained what I was going to do with the Vick's. She said 'I'll do it.' Whereupon she went out side and promptly put the cat into the ground, and covered it up. After the process was over with I made my way outside with a sheepish smile on my face. She looked over at me, called me a Pussy, handed me the shovel, and went back in the house muttering something about how Men were inferior beings.

I believed her...............