Thirst by Ken Kalfus Read Free Book Online

world of living things is lucky, as our lives would be left to us in death: remembering remembering remembering, and so on. Murry was astonished when Porter’s sixty-second pitch
passed through his bat, emerging on the other side of it into the catcher’s glove. The pop sounded like a champagne bottle being opened, and he recalled a New Year’s Eve that had not yet come. “All right,” said the umpire. “Get your ass out of here.” Murry, however, does not recall the return to the dugout, and as sleep gently retakes him, his memory turns back in confusion to the thought that the at bat would last forever. A happy man, he curls his body around that of his wife, as if he were crowding the plate.

Cats in Space
    F or reasons that had become unknown, a large number of cats occupied the otherwise orderly suburban neighborhood in which I grew up. They belonged to no one and were fed by no one, yet they proliferated the way roaches did elsewhere. None had names, except those that distinguished them by their defects: One Eye, Torn Ear, Limpo. They knocked over garbage cans, tore up gardens, and shrieked across the night. They were unloved, even by the sweetest of the block’s littlest kids. My across-the-street neighbor, Ricky Brennan, shot BBs at them from his bedroom window.
    Every spring, as if by ancient tradition, Nathan Wasserman’s older brother Mark would visit the places where we had discovered litters the previous few weeks, under porches and in garages. He’d tear the kittens from their mothers two or three at a time and toss them into a brown paper supermarket bag, scrupulously using one bag per litter. Then he’d tie the bag closed with a piece of twine. The mother cats were too phlegmatic to offer opposition, hardly even hissing. They had, like us, become accustomed to the routine.
    Mark would put the bags in his father’s car, we’d pile in, and without saying a word he’d drive us to the shallow body of water we called either the pond, the swamp, or the sump, about three quarters of a mile away. It was
large—we could have called it a lake—but it appeared to be fed only by the dregs of beer bottles tossed in from cars parked on the secluded, unlit strip of road that grazed it on the way to the next suburban subdivision. The pond never looked clean, or like water at all. Its liquid thick and oily, on humid days the pond sweated the odor of mothballs. Fathers sometimes brought their very young kids there and, with a hook and a line, allowed them to pretend to fish.
    Once every spring five or six of us would lean against the car while Mark carried the shopping bags to the pond’s edge. As he picked up the bags, the kittens inside became frantic, now crying, now snarling, now moaning, now crying again. Mark showed neither pleasure nor discomfort at his task, nor even that he noticed the animal commotion in his hands. We admired him for this, though as we got older we discovered that his cool was in fact a kind of dullness and he became something of a joke. Mark would step to the water’s edge and without ceremony fling the sacks about twenty feet into the pond. They spun end over end a few times and then made an odd, tinny, unwatery splash. One or two of the bags might resurface for a moment. The mewls of the drowning kittens, clearly heard from where we stood, were wonderfully terrifying, the authentic song of death.
    Although one couldn’t swim in the pond, it was a frequent make-out site for our older brothers and, incredibly, our older sisters. A line of parked cars fronted the pond every weekend and summer night. Once there was a “drought,” or at least a couple of hot months of infrequent rainfall. The pond didn’t dry up completely,
but the level fell, revealing tire husks, encrusted automobile batteries, corroded bicycle frames, and empty paint cans. One afternoon that summer I walked along the water’s edge with a few of my friends. They believed they would find used condoms in the cracked