Dragon greeted me at the door, purring figure-eights through my ankles and meowing in his weird-high kitten voice as I pet my apologies for being at work all day. He continued his affections even after I put dinner out, rubbing his side against my shins between bites. After I broke up with Karl, Dragon would be the only one who loved me.
Dragon stopped eating and looked toward the door, alert. I heard Karl’s car approaching a moment later. I took a deep breath. I had practiced. I was ready. We listened to him park, and Dragon bristled.
When Karl pulled the screen door open, Dragon darted past him outside with a hiss. The screen door slowly bounced and rattled shut, and Karl crossed his arms and looked at me, waiting. I wasn’t going to say anything about him letting the cat out this time, although it felt almost like he was almost daring me to. I had practiced a script, and I stuck to it.
“Karl,” I said. “I’m breaking up with you. I won’t see you anymore and I mean it this time.”
He kept looking at me, kept breathing slow and steady through his nose, almost as if he hadn’t heard me. Only the twitching muscle in his neck suggested he had. In the long, awkward silence, I felt doubt creep in, and a sudden urge to apologize or take it back. Part of me still thought I was wrong for this, that I was blowing things out of proportion and ignoring my responsibility in what had happened. I still thought that I could convince him to love me, the right way, if I tried harder, did better. But when someone hits you, you’re supposed to leave.
We stood staring at each other in silence. I looked down at the abandoned cat food dish because I didn’t want to see it coming if he hit me again, but he didn’t hit me and he didn’t even say anything. He just threw the screen door open and walked out, the banging and rattling and bouncing sound of it ringing. Part of me wanted to go after him. But it was done, I’d needed to do it and I did it, and I did not follow him. I had to make dinner and get to bed, anyway. It was Monday, and already after seven, and I had work in the morning. I pressed my fingers into my cheekbone to feel the hurt, but the bruise from last week was gone.
The thing about Karl was that I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me. He was nice. He called his mom. People loved him. Plus, I wasn’t blameless. I’d slammed doors, I’d yelled. One time, I threw a plate against the wall and it shattered. But when someone hits you, you leave. That’s what you do, even if no one else loves you but your cat.
I heard his car door open and the car turn on and back up quickly, and then I heard a terrible sound and the car door opened again and Karl said, “Oh no.” I wanted to pretend I didn’t hear anything, I just wanted him to leave. Forget cleaning up, forget a shower — I wanted to lock the door, curl up in bed, and cry.
Karl came running in and I flinched but he didn’t say anything about me flinching this time. His eyes looked wild.
“Dragon—”
I ran outside. It was after sunset but I could see Dragon on the driveway and his chest was moving weird and his front paw was kind of twitching. Dragon must have been hiding under the car, which he did sometimes. Karl knew that. He just left so fast that Dragon couldn’t get out of the way.
“Dragonface, what did he do to you?” I touched Dragon’s fur and it was wet.
Karl took his shirt off. He wrapped the fabric over his hands and scooped up Dragon, who looked like he was trying to meow, but there was no sound and his eyes were rolling back in his head.
“We have to get him to the vet.” Karl’s voice was tight. He held Dragon out to me.
I took Dragon and ran to the passenger side and I held his tiny body on my lap as we drove. I said things like, “It’s ok, it’s ok, my poor kitty, oh my poor kitty, hold on we’re almost there.”
But of course I was lying. It was twenty minutes to the animal hospital and Dragonface didn’t make it.
We waited in the lobby anyway, like maybe they could bring him back, or maybe we didn’t know what death was and they could still fix this. I sat in one of the chairs thinking please be OK please be OK as hard as I could. I knew nothing was OK, but sometimes you just really want to be wrong. Sometimes you want to believe the universe will change if you want something hard enough. Karl paced in his undershirt and got frustrated with how long it was taking.
“Why won’t they tell us what’s happening?” Karl asked. “They can’t just not tell us.” Karl stared out the window at the parking lot. “You shouldn’t have let him lie in the driveway.”
A nurse came out and asked if I wanted to keep the body. My jeans were covered in cat pee and blood. I said I wanted to bury him. They brought out a little box of Dragon, and Karl’s stained shirt folded neatly. I took Dragon, and Karl took his shirt, and we got back into the car and Karl drove me home. There was a stain on the driveway, but it wasn’t big. Cat-sized.
We sat in the parked car. Part of me wanted to yell at Karl. See? See what an asshole you are? You only pretend like you care when someone is physically hurt. But I couldn’t. I was crushed. Dragon was crushed. My sweet kitty had gotten run over, and it was all my fault for not breaking up with Karl sooner. I started bawling. Karl didn’t say anything for a while, but then I heard him crying, too. And who was he crying for? Dragon? Or himself?
“Maria I’m so sorry,” he said, and I hated him then.
Now? I wanted to ask. Now, you’re sorry? Now is too late. But I didn’t say anything. I just held the cardboard corners of Dragon’s box.
“I’ll help you bury him,” Karl said.
I was so angry that I stopped crying. Nothing else that Karl had done, not even last week, had ever made me hate him. But there are some things you can’t forgive people for. And I hated him for doing this to Dragon.
“I never want to see you again,” I said.
I meant it for good this time. He didn’t look at me. I got out of the car and went inside. Dragon’s leftover dinner was still in the crusty dish on the floor. I put Dragon’s box on the kitchen countertop and I sobbed.
After midnight, I went out back with a shovel and dug a pit in the garden by the zinnias. Dragon had always liked the zinnias. He had free reign in the fenced-in backyard, and he would walk past the zinnias, setting them to sway, and rub the blossoms with his face. It took a long time to dig the hole, even though a cat isn’t that big. But I couldn’t sleep anyway. I set his box in and said goodbye. Then I pressed the earth over him with my hands and went inside. In the morning, before work, I scrubbed the dirt out from underneath my fingernails.
When the receptionist saw me the next morning, she immediately asked, “what’s wrong.”
“My boyfriend ran over my cat,” I said. Her eyes widened. I corrected myself: “Ex-boyfriend.’
‘Wait, did he do it on purpose?”
“Who cares if he did it on purpose, what difference does that make?”
“It makes a big difference,” Ramona said. “You can’t fault someone for a mistake.”
“You can absolutely fault anyone for anything,” I said. “You fault me for expense reports.”
She looked at me with her mouth open, but she didn’t reply.
I walked through a cemetery of cubicles and found my plot. I was supposed to call a vendor, but I kept tearing up and I knew my voice would shake. I cried in the bathroom instead. Then I wandered back to Ramona’s desk. Steve came over and asked what was wrong.
“Maria broke up with her boyfriend because he killed her cat,” Ramona said.
“On purpose?” Steve asked.
“Why does it matter if it’s on purpose? My cat is fucking dead.”
“OK, jeez,” Steve said. He put his hands up like I was arresting him.
“He must feel awful,” Ramona said. “You can’t break up with a guy for a mistake.”
i wanted to say, A Mistake? A mistake is like buying diet too-sweet yogurt cups instead of the full-fat kind with jam on top. A mistake is continuing to date a guy after the second time he calls you stupid. Being so busy thinking about yourself that you run over Dragon is not a mistake.
But instead I said, “I can and I did.”
Ramona looked at Steve, and Steve said he had to get back to the fulfillment team about an order and left to his desk.
“I’m going to go home,” I said.
“You should. You should do that. You seem really stressed.”
“I’m not stressed, I’m grieving,” I said.
“It’s just a cat,” Ramona said.
That’s where I lost it. “You think I should forgive my stupid boyfriend because he didn’t mean to run over my cat? I don’t care what he meant. You know who deserves another chance? Dragon. But Dragon doesn’t get one. I should have broken up with Karl last week when he gave me a black eye. Then Dragon would still be here.”
“You said you dropped a plate on your face when you were putting dishes away.”
“Yeah and Kelly really walked into a door.”
Ramona’s eyes widened and she looked toward Kelly’s old desk, but Kelly had quit in March and moved to Colorado to live with her mother.
“I’m going home,” I said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Sure, sure, definitely.”
While waiting for the elevator, I noticed Steve back at Ramona’s desk. Now everyone would know, and everyone would argue over whether I was lying and whether I deserved it. I felt bad I’d brought Kelly up.
I didn’t go home immediately. I went for a walk and I ended up in Chinatown. I wasn’t planning to, not consciously anyway. I went into a place called Lucky Dragon Bakery and I got an egg tart and a tea, and then I still had some tea left so I got another egg tart.
“They’re good huh?” the lady behind the counter said when I finished the second one.
They were, and I said so, and then I asked if I could have two more. She thought that was funny. I ate both of them there in the bakery, but I was thinking about how Karl liked egg tarts too. And then I felt twice as lonely. I wondered if Ramona was right and I was being too harsh. I also felt a little sick, maybe from all the egg tarts.
Afterward, I walked around, wandering through shops. I went into a store with pots in the window and I found a concrete statue of a dragon curled up like a sleeping cat. I touched the statue’s head like I was petting it and I started crying. The dragon had whiskers and bushy eyebrows like Dragon and seemed like it could survive being run over. The statue was $45 and really heavy but perfect for Dragon so I bought it anyway. I heaved it off the shelf and lugged it over to the checkout counter. The cashier guy seemed uncomfortable. I was still crying and occasionally choking on sobs.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“It’s all my fault.”
“I’m sorry.”
I sniffed hard to avoid dripping snot on the counter.
“That’s $49.52 with tax.”
When I got home, Karl was sitting on my step.
“Why are you here?”
He stood up and scratched his head. He looked sad.
My fingers hurt from carrying the statue and my eyes hurt from crying and I didn’t want to see Karl. I tried to adjust my grip and the statue slipped. I reflexively moved my foot out of the way and the statue hit the ground, cracking off the dragon’s front paw.
I picked up the foot and said, “I can’t keep anything safe.”
Karl came over and picked up the statue. “Where does it go?”
So I showed him where I buried Dragon. He set the statue on the dirt and I fit the broken paw into place. If you didn’t look at the crack across the paw, the dragon almost looked like it was unbroken and nothing had happened to it. I wanted that to be true. I wanted nothing bad to have happened.
“He always liked those flowers,” Karl said.
“Zinnias,” I said. The flowers bobbed in the wind. “He always hated you.”
“Yeah.”
I started crying and Karl put his arm around me and I sobbed salt and snot into his shirt. Karl thumbed the wet off my cheek. For a moment I thought I heard a cat crying and I looked up. But it was the neighbor’s fence squeaking. That’s all it was. I knew that was all it was, but sometimes I just want to believe things are different than they are. The flowers brushed against the statue’s face, and the fence squeaked, and I wanted to believe it could be different.
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Kate Pyontek is a poet and writer originally from New Jersey. Kate’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ecotone, New Ohio Review, The Glacier, Southeast Review, and other journals. “Dragon” is their first publication in fiction. Kate currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Sasha Weiss is a writer and artist who sometimes publishes under the name Alexandra. Sasha has written two chapbooks, autumn is when the ghosts come out (Blanket Sea Press, 2022) and obituary for my hot sauce shelf (Bottlecap Press, 2023), with a third forthcoming from Querencia Press.
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