Bouchemp

Bouchemp

The summer Jason turned eight he found a dead cat in the alley behind his house. It was a treasure. He poked at it with a stick and burned the fur with a magnifying glass, holding his nose at the smell. One of the cat’s eyes was stuck open and Jason was intrigued by the way it never blinked, even when he caught an ant and placed it on the cloudy, dead eyeball and watched it crawl around in small circles as if looking for a good place to exit.

Jason visited the carcass every day. He dragged it into his yard with a stick and hid it beneath his porch, careful not to actually touch it. He called the cat Bouchemp, a word he made up to sound like some other word he’d heard grown-ups say when drinking beer down by the softball fields. He first used the name and attached it to the carcass the morning he discovered a sizzling nest of flies nesting in the cat’s open eye.

Jason was furious. He scattered the flies with a stick and cursed at them, “Stay away from Bouchemp!”

On the night before his eighth birthday, Jason dreamed of water, huge and blue and flat like the sky, deep as forever, silent as snow. He dreamed that he was swimming, floating like a cork, looking at clouds, drifting like air. Then, in the dream, Bouchemp was with him, floating beside him, nudging his arm.

Jason slammed awake with a scream in his throat and sweat in the creases of his neck. He ran down the stairs and outside to look under the porch at his pet dead cat.