Kitty Litter
- Feb 17, 2023
- 3 min read
by Z.H. Gill
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My fiancée’s sister wears a teensy glass vial of kitty litter (ultra-fine, gray-as-dusk — and soiled, we think) on a red string around her neck wherever she goes. For good luck, she says. Sleeps in it, too. My fiancée tells me her sister didn’t take the family tabby’s death too well: Carl was his name.
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In his early middle age, Martino Joinville, the lauded Italo-British performance artist, began to shit in a litter box as part of the research process for the first of his famous “cat pieces.” His wife designated a room for this in the back wing of her ancestral home to keep his affectation out of sight. He stayed at it, apparently, until his death back in 2015.
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I read a story in the local paper — paper’s generous, it’s a newsletter, really — about a teenager passing off cat litter for cocaine. He sold it to other dumb kids on a bench in front of the Subway franchise across from the high school, my alma mater. A sandwich artist called the cops.
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Ed Lowe, the business-minded Michigander who championed/popularized the use of granulated clay for the litter box, paced around his study one unseasonably warm evening in October ’87. He’d been drinking cheap scotch. His wife watched Moonlighting in their bedroom down the hall; he could hear her laughing, could hear Bruce Willis laughing. He stared at a framed picture on his desk of his grinning son — now 15, but seven in that photo — and thought: I wish my son was a cat.
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Over her Christmas vacation, back home from her freshman year at Bucknell, Jodie ate a cookie left by their neighbor Henriette, known around the cul-de-sac and well beyond for an uncommon deftness at baking. Jodie didn’t realize this seemingly innocent cookie was besmirched with peanut M&Ms, to which she was deathly allergic. She died as she and her father struggled searching for her EpiPen, turning over the entirety of the kitchen and the first-floor bathroom. Her windpipe closed and she died. Paramedics couldn’t revive her; in fact they showed up much later than their average response time would have suggested due to a five-alarm fire in a warehouse by the railyard three miles away sparked by two clueless teenagers and their first batch of homemade fireworks. Peter, their Egyptian Mau — small among his siblings, but not the runt, who didn’t survive — stood over her body; he nuzzled up against her stiff legs before collapsing between them. He hadn’t been the same since she left for school. He was always running into walls, sometimes at truly alarming speeds. (House cats can run up to nearly 30 miles per hour, Jodie once told her father over the phone, as he watched Peter stalk a wounded bat around the house.) Jodie’s father was completely dejected, nearly catatonic — she was all he had left after a long life of promises mostly never panning out. But after ten days he had to clean Peter’s litter box, the acrid fog in the air was getting to him. He sifted around in there and very quickly found the EpiPen intact in its packaging, barely disturbed at all beyond the slight impressions left by the ash-like clay.
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George “Gately” Gallagher heard from his agent that his nationally syndicated orange-cat-comic-strip Heathcliff was about to face some competition from another nationally-syndicated orange-cat-comic-strip. Don’t worry, his agent said, it’s three panels. You’re a one-panel guy! Certainly room for both. But Gallagher still had him send this Jim Davis-nobody an entire pallet of Tidy Cat litter.
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They found the Blair baby’s body in the litter box. Their wizened Highland Fold Henry was snuggling with it — guarding it, wrote one reporter.
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I rescued my cat Hans from a life beneath my friend Nikki’s porch, from a life of shitting in cold dirt. Each night in my dreams the ghosts of his brothers and sisters — who went missing, one by one, after I took Hans home — torment me, a furry little choir of Why Him’s? and Not Me’s? One night, finally, I try honesty, I tell them: Because he was the cutest. They haven’t been back since. (May they rest in peace.)
Z.H. Gill works at a vanity label in West Hollywood, CA.
