Warble

It’s a warble,” said her Uncle Ted. “See em in squirrels sometimes.” He drew on his cigarette and Leena watched its smoke spread out like fog around her mother’s face.

It was a typical summer Saturday afternoon, she and her mother “baking,” as her mother called it, in deck chairs around her aunt and uncle’s in-ground pool. Leena and her mother had been staying there for two weeks while her father “packed his shit.”

“Never heard of such a thing,” replied her mother, also smoking, her exhale adding to the fog and enveloping Leena and the tiny kitten Leena held in her outstretched palm.

The kitten was sick. This was clear by the way everyone, including its brothers and sisters, avoided it in their crawling and tumbling around the pool deck. The kitten had a bulge in its neck like a tumor except this tumor had broken through its skin, creating a black circle filled with blood and flesh.

Leena had spotted the kittens under the deck land and coaxed them out. She had then carried the little sick-looking one up, inspecting its neck. She wondered if her mother would let her take one back to their house once her father was gone. Leena wasn’t sure what had happened between her mother and father but she knew better than to ask too much. Her mother was the kind of person who liked you to mind your business. She was also the kind of person who thought adults were better off in the company of other adults than with children and that if a child, a child like Leena, had to be around, then it was best if she kept herself busy with something quiet.

The three of them, Leena, her mother, and her Uncle Ted, sat in a semi-circle, Leena holding the frail kitten and her mother and Uncle Ted lounging, stretched out in the sun next to one another. Something else beside tobacco smoke hung in the air around them as well, Leena thought, something like anger, that extra bit of heat filling the summer space.

“Something’s in there?” Leena asked her uncle, holding up the kitten.

“Yep,” said Uncle Ted, “Warble.”

“Gross.”

“Put it down,” said Leena’s mother, “you don’t want to get whatever it is.”

Leena nodded but did not set down the kitten. It was a tortoise shell kitten, mostly black with swirls and lines of brown, and its ears were pointed and larger than they seemed like they should be. Leena’s teeth, she had been told, were also larger than they seemed like they should be. Her mother kept telling her not to worry—that she’d grow into them. She wondered if the kitten would die and never grow into its ears. Something behind her eyes swelled hot and stinging and she looked up to keep the tears from showing.

“Just let it die. It’s gonna die anyway,” said Uncle Ted as he tossed his glowing cigarette butt in the glass ashtray on the plastic deck table. Uncle Ted was like that with cats. It was a country thing, Leena’s mother had told her. Uncle Ted was even more country than Leena’s aunt Carrie, her mother’s sister, and aunt Carrie was so country she knew how to skin a deer and debone a catfish and all kinds of other things that Leena could never imagine her mother doing.

“Why would it die?” Leena asked, but Uncle Ted didn’t hear her. He was already up and wobbling back into the kitchen. He had hurt his leg logging only a few weeks back and still hadn’t regained all his strength.

“I’m going to kill it,” said Leena.

“What?” replied her mother, “Leave it alone. You’re not going to kill a kitten.”

“Not the kitten, Mom, the warble. Go get me a tweezers.”

Her mother rolled her eyes but stood up, tossed her own cigarette in the ash tray, and stepped barefoot across the deck toward Leena.

Her mother had been rolling her eyes less...