Something Else the Cat Drug In

 

This time it was a pepper.

(I’m talking about back in October.)

He’s always doing this—my husband. He’ll deposit just inside the door, maybe on the bar stool, some wretched morsel from the garden—perhaps a knotted turnip, or bitter, scarred leaves of his Chinese cabbage, or a beet grown morbidly obese, clods of dirt falling off. So then there’s dirt on the stool, too.

The pepper, when he scared it up, was beneath a plant on its last legs. When he dumped it on me he’d already taken out a chunk. The sweetness was what had him gloating. Hideous and withered as the thing was, collapsed in on itself, all the sugars concentrated, I could see he might be right. So I washed off the dirt and gnawed, purring just like him. For once we both liked his trophy.