BOOKENDS

SCOTT RUSSELL

The night before, in the cooling end of September, your boss called with a final warning, saying that your productivity was down, not rising up to the standard expected. He reminded you were still in the 90 days probationary period.

You have to stop your cat’s thyroid medicine in June, because the heart and kidneys are both going. With the interactions, it has become foregone, a matter of comfort and ease.

That July, you were so excited to go work for a company in the so-called psychedelic renaissance. You loved the synergy of your own mental health treatment with your career, and you appreciated the injection of enthusiasm into software work that a new team provided.

When you flew out to SF—no one at the company calls it San Francisco—for your first week in August, it turned out your new boss forgot that you were coming. Your new teammates took you to a bar they were going to anyway, despite your being publicly sober. You had dinner alone every night, and went solo to a Giants game. At lunch, your new, well-traveled CEO griped about how overrated Paris is compared to their favorite spots in Germany.

After the last warning meeting with your boss, a Tuesday night, your cat of thirteen years suddenly can’t stand on her hind legs, can’t walk up the stairs, can’t use her litter box. You fall asleep taking photos together in your favorite spot cuddling in bed.

Your ex comes over that following morning to say goodbye. She notices how really alone you are, how much your cat had become your whole world, how much you have relied on her support during the pandemic isolation of the last few years.

When you get home from the veterinary hospital that afternoon, you go sit in the park a hard while. You think about walking into traffic, but call your mom instead, asking to stay over.

On Friday, you were so excited, dissociatively delirious, eager to talk with coworkers about your ketamine treatment that morning. No one knew about what happened Wednesday.

In September, you joined the company retreat in PV—no one at the company calls it Puerto Vallarta—at an all-inclusive resort. You forgave your ethical stance against these economic leeches on Central American communities because your company did such good work for mental health here in the States. After feeling confident and affirmed wearing your favorite dress to the party the last night of the trip, your boss didn’t talk to you for the next two weeks.

You call your vet crying that Wednesday morning, and they can’t help you. You call multiple at-home services and no one is immediately available. You run out of time. You don’t want to go to the hospital. You carry her in a blanket all morning, swaddled and unmoving. She never pees nor cries nor makes a dash from your arms. She just stares up at you, waiting on you to be ready for what needs to happen next.

The following Monday, and you threw yourself with abandon back into the job, this loathsome career path. You scheduled a day of work in the city, so you could see friends and attend a book reading that night. You got onto the wifi in a loud Starbucks on the Lower East Side and found your boss and his boss and HR have scheduled an immediate call.

They never fully explained themselves afterward. The prolonged silence, the warning call with no time to react, the indifference to the week, the month you’d had. You thought, that figures, all pretense of team as family revealed for the demand of loyalty it always was.

You never expect it from a hospital, but by the care they give to your grief, the patience, the love and understanding, clearly, animal people love animals and their people. You cherish those last minutes together, and getting to be there with the suddenly slacking cooling quieted bundle in your arms afterward.

Scott E. Russell is 42 years old and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. They are new but passionate about creative writing, having discovered that all their unrealized software/art project ideas could be fed into a writer’s world-building hopper. Scott has published flash fictions in Blood Tree Literature and Pile Press, along with poetry and hybrid pieces in anthologies from Sunday Mornings by the River and Querencia Press.