The dog days of summer, dear diary, are heavily upon us here in New York City.   The radio warns of a fourth straight day of heat alert, real-feel temperatures again well above 100 with humidity to melt you.  Keep your pets inside, air-conditioner on high, the expert on the radio advises.   Check on the old people next door, make sure they have not parboiled.   The city opens “cooling centers” where sweat-soaked, stinking citizens can come and recover in super-cooled public rooms scattered around the more working class neighborhoods.

I am a complainer by nature, so it will surprise no-one to hear me bitch about lifting my head from a wet pillow, unpeeling myself from the wet sheets and picking up the thermometer I’d dragged up to the bedroom late last night.  I smirked as I read “95”.    I nodded grimly, this all figures, I said to myself, possibly out loud, as I began to mutter and staggered downstairs to get something to drink to restore some of the lost hydration I’d left soaking the bed.

A pair of bare feet at the bottom of the stairs startled me, I caught the next mumbled syllable in my throat.  It was Sekhnet, waiting for a call-back from work, stretched out near the cat, both of them vaguely in the warm wind of a tower fan, the only thing standing between any of us and certain death from heat stroke.   There is a tower fan next to me now as I write, bringing semi-cool air to my left armpit and side, wicking away the freely flowing sweat. I dare not write much longer, for fear of burning out this laptop in the 95 degree heat up here.  

Sekhnet was somber there on the living room floor.  We’d trapped three feral kittens the last few days, had them neutered by a vet a friend recommended, with certificates from a nonprofit making each wild animal’s care come in at not much more than a hundred and thirty dollars.  The two I picked up at the vet’s yesterday, after their hysterectomies, cried all the way home.  It was pitiful.  I was glad Sekhnet wasn’t there, her sobs would have drowned out the wails of the miserable little cats.

These feral cats have brutal, short lives in Sekhnet’s garden, though she cares for them like they were her own pets.  An old one lives to be two or three.  We have seen many generations now, and each generation has ended badly, dead kittens found here and there virtually every season, the older ones simply disappearing.  A dead kitten was found today, one of the almost full-grown males from Mama Kitten’s previous litter.  The grey, tiger striped corpse was found under the Chan’s apricot tree.  Sekhnet had Joe open the contractor bag so she could identify the dead cat.

“Scratchy,” she told me, and urged me not to mention it to the younger brother of the neighbor next door if I see him across the garden fence, to let his older brother tell him when he gets home from work.   The younger brother is a sad, limited man.  He has some kind of mental problems that erupt in screams sometimes, once in a while the cops are called in.   Not much danger of me running into the brother, or anyone else, as I won’t be spending more than a moment out there today, and certainly not a second at the garden fence.

“Mama Kitten had her litter, as I told you she was,” said Sekhnet, “she came by today and she’s not pregnant any more.”  Mama Kitten had her first litter at the age of six or seven months.  Three kittens, two of whom survived, one of whom survives today (the third is the corpse in Joe Chan’s contractor bag).  The runt of that litter, cute, spunky Dobbie (named for his long ears which made him look like J.K. Rowling’s house elf) made a nice meal for a red-tailed hawk, as far as we can tell.

We watched the two surviving kittens of that first litter eventually drive Mama Kitten out of the garden and take the turf for themselves.  Talk about ungrateful fucking offspring.  Talk about the cruelty of nature.  (Talk about a metal laptop heating almost to frying pan temperature…).  She’d come around to visit, always affectionate– rare in a feral cat.  She’d come to trust Sekhnet and me, would rub her face on our legs, let us pet her one stroke as she’d walk the length of her body under our hand.  

One day, as all the feral mother cats around here have always done, she came to the garden to introduce her new kittens to their benefactor, Sekhnet.  She marched four of them past, three with white faces like Dobbie’s, one who looked like her tiny twin.  Of those four, three survived (one disappeared a week or two ago, probably lunch for a red-tail).  All three have now been neutered (though it seems the runt may not be up for the challenge of survival– not having taken a bite since returning from the vet’s yesterday, staying out of sight) and…

“Mama Cat came by, skinny again,” reported Sekhnet somberly.  In a nest somewhere nearby she has her next litter, four or more adorable little doomed kittens born on a very muggy day in hell.   Mama Kitten was the one we were trying to trap, to have her spayed and the embryonic kittens aborted, but she was too wary, too close to giving birth by the time we arranged with our friends to come by with the traps and expertise in how to catch the ferals so they could be released back into the wild in a way that would not increase their already too large numbers.  

“She loved the turkey, which is what we should bait the trap with, once she reappears with her new batch of kids, once they’re weaned,” said Sekhnet.  “She hated the sardines though, she gave me a very dirty look and jumped back when I offered them.   Mini-Me ate the sardines, though Mama Kitten hissed at me for offering them to her.”  

The mother kitten began hissing at her kids when she became pregnant again, making sure they were on their own before she brought the next batch into the world.  So far this beautiful little cat, now little more than a year old, maybe a year and a half at most, has given birth to seven kittens that we’ve seen and several more newborns, tiny and suckling somewhere behind a garage, waiting to become Sekhnet’s adorable little charges.

Meanwhile, it is about a hundred degrees and only two of her last batch of four kittens is accounted for, the one who looks like her and the one still at the vet’s.  Hearty, brave and recently spayed, the little alpha kitten who looks like her has been up and around, eating with her usual gusto.   Her sister, skinny and withdrawn, traumatized by her trip to the vet, did not eat yesterday and has not been seen today.  The blue-eyed Dobbie-looking sibling, who turns out to be a boy, I will pick up at the vet’s tomorrow.  He will probably cry the whole way home, like his sisters cried yesterday.  Luckily, Sekhnet will be at work and not in the car, crying along with the cat.

Well, diary dear, I’d better shut this machine down, before it fries itself.  I ought to hop into the shower and drink another liter of seltzer, if I know what’s good for me.  Stay cool!