Bobcats of Love

Jenny’s confused about what she’s seeing at first, thinking it’s the largest house cat that she’s ever seen until she understands that no, the animal behind her parents’ place is a bobcat, stalking maybe a squirrel or maybe a dog or house cat. She starts to shout “Hey!” but thinks it’s wrong as she’s doing it, and the shout becomes aborted and twisted in her throat and what comes out is a strangled guttural, but it has the same effect anyway. The bobcat turns to her and presumably whatever it is stalking has a chance to get away. Jenny feels guilty because now she feels kinship with the cat who is just hungry, just trying to make it through the day. She supposes if she’d seen the prey, her allegiance would be with it. She thinks she’s fallen in love with the animal a little, the way you fall in love with a dog or cat and project all the emotions you have stored from previous pets onto the newest animal. And that’s the thing about love; it’s cloudy and hard on you. She thinks that universal love is impossible because to love everything would be to walk through a constant emotional battleground. She thinks that she wants to take this animal home and raise it the way she raised a kitten she brought home from her friend’s cat’s litter when she was a kid. Her mother hated the thing, but she loved Jenny, so she let her keep it, complaining every day after that about having an animal underfoot until Jenny hated her mother a little every time she talked about it. She thinks that she might have killed the bobcat by chasing away its meal, and that love kills things whether you want it to or not. She thinks about her father who saw her cat prowling after a mouse in the backyard. He got his .22 rifle and drew a bead on it, and then exhaled loudly to get Jenny to notice him and said, “Glad I didn’t shoot. I thought it was a woodchuck.” He laughed in relief, and Jenny always figured he was just trying to teach her a lesson. She can’t imagine what that lesson was, but she figures he had good intentions somewhere down at the heart of his actions. She thinks about how the best intentions twist into themselves, and you end up hurting. By the time she reaches the back door, the bobcat has gone back into the woods, and she places her hand on the doorknob and takes four large breaths in and out before she enters this place with people she loves. Certainly she loves them, but when she speaks to them, the words so often become aborted and twisted in her throat.

John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, NY.

Published October 22 2022