So, true story.

When I was starting 1st or 2nd grade, I got a cat. It had shown up as a ~6 month kitten at the patio door of a family friend, had a kink in its tail that the vet guessed was from being run over by a car tire, maybe one it had curled up to sleep under.

This cat was skittish as hell, if it had been socialized at all it was poorly, when I got to this family friend’s house we had to keep picking up pieces of furniture that it would try to hide under. I named it Freely, because “she ran around so freely”, and I was the kind of weirdo kid who would name a pet after an adverb.

She started out afraid of humans and it didn’t help that little kid me was like “pet! let’s play!” in a way that cats don’t really play, so her whole life she was distant and pissy. I went off to college, and then to LA and she stayed with my parents.

One year I was flying home for Christmas and my flight got cancelled because the plane was stuck under a blizzard in Denver or something, I got rebooked for two days on. Apparently I missed my last chance to see her because the next day my dad called to say she’d died, which wasn’t too sad because she’d always been distant and pissy.

So he asked what he should do with the body, options included putting it in the dumpster at his office, cremating it in the incinerator at his office, or burying it out in some woods by the country club, I asked him to do #3 because it seemed the most dignified.

Ha.

So, flew home, did Christmas, flew back, a few months later my mom calls me laughing her ass off. Apparently a cop knocked on her door around noon all seriously asking where my father was, she told him he was at the office and what was this about, cop just insisted he needed to talk to him, so she took a number and my dad called back when he came home.

Cop came back over and it turns out to be this: my dad went to bury Freely but the ground was frozen hard, the softest ground he could find was down by a creek so he dug as deep as he reasonably could (he was in his mid-60s at this point), buried her, and piled rocks on top to keep scavengers away.

But then the snow melted and flooded the creek up to its banks, the rocks and loose soil floated away, and this plastic bag with my dead cat inside floated several miles downstream until this dinky-ass creek passed over someone’s driveway at which point it beached, and this housewife coming out to get the paper encountered this rotten, waterlogged cat corpse stranded in the middle of her drive, freaked out, and called the cops. And as my dad hadn’t had the foresight to take off the collar and tag around her neck, it came back to him.

So there was this cop standing in the living room basically asking my dad if he had murdered my cat, possibly as part of a ritual to cast a spell on this random woman, while my father was just doubled over laughing in his recliner, the cop being all “this is a serious matter, sir”.

He was convinced and went away, and that’s how the best story about my first cat takes place months after her death.