It was so cold that night. It didn’t matter that the furnace was on or that the fireplace downstairs had been lit for hours. Ava could still feel the drafts from the cheap windows with no curtains. 

It was so cold that night. She huddled into a ball under the thin sheet and old woolen blanket. Her pajama bottoms didn’t fit anymore. She wore her pajama top and a pair of her father’s old wool socks. Ava’s mother would always say, ‘make do.’ Ava knew that unbidden things, like tears, are hard to stop once you start them. So, she tried hard to make do and not to shiver because she was afraid she would never be able to stop. 

She was so afraid that night. She was scared of the cold, the unrelenting, icy breath that blew in sharp gusts and shallow whispers, frightened the cold would leech into her and she would be forced to carry it around forever.

She was so afraid that night. She was scared of the animal noises the wind was making, so afraid it would be strong enough to blow the house down like her teacher had read aloud to them in that story. There was no moon that night. The darkness seeped in with the cold, erasing whatever ambient light remained.

Curled tightly onto herself in that icy, dark room, Ava finally fell asleep. When Ava awoke, it was to the sound of a kitten mewling, every breath a cry filled with so much sadness it made something twist, like a sharp knife, inside her. The cries rose above the wind, pitched higher and more frantic than those unrelenting drumbeats of cold air. Ava fell into silent tears that made her shake more than the temperature. She couldn’t make do. Ava wanted the crying to stop. She wanted everything to stop. And it did. Everything stopped in one second of suspended silence. 

Then, one last lonely cry of desperate longing, a cry not of this earth, pierced that quiet. It sounded to Ava like all the ghosts you could imagine in a chorus that drilled out and flooded a hollow spot inside her. It was worse than the cold, worse than a twisting knife.

The cry of an animal dying is like nothing you have ever heard. In that plaintive sound is the noise a soul makes as it comes unmoored from the body that contains it. That melancholy sound is the last vestige of a beating heart, flowing blood and breaths taken. In that plaintive sound is the cry of the living against the void. The roar of a dying animal is a single moment that encapsulates the life, the being, the essence of something that was once alive and is no longer. The cry of a dying animal tells a story.

When this animal, this tiny kitten, was alive, she had no name. She was one of many born to a feral mother on this farm in a Midwestern town. The cats, this kitten, and her brothers and sisters roamed the farm into the fields of soybeans and corn, into the small copses and stands of trees grown to prevent the wind from stealing the soil. The cats caught what food they could – field mice, moles, birds, and snakes. The cats were food for other animals, bigger and with more muscle and bone than they would ever grow to have. They were almost always hungry, probably weaned too young from their much too young mother.

They were not pets. None had ever known the care of regular food and clean water. None had ever known the kindness of a human hand petting their fur, stroking their heads, scratching their ears. That life was as alien as the moon to them.

This kitten had learned about the warm spot on the concrete path above the fireplace in the basement. She would sit there and defend her territory from her brothers and sisters. Sometimes she would join them bunched on the hay scattered on the shed floor. But she stayed alone that night, huddled into herself to take and keep what warmth she could.

The kitten had made a choice. Die or live unloved. Have her voice heard against the darkness, the cold, the eternal nothing. Let the universe hear one tiny living thing as it empties its life, a cry against the sadness, a longing for something other. She had made a choice that night to surrender her voice.

Ava had not been able to fall back asleep after that moment when the darkness won. She cried until all her tears were gone and then lay perfectly still, letting the cold and the dark fill her. It was bitterly cold when the first rays of the sun broke through. Ava ran down the basement steps and out the door. Her skin prickled when the cold air slapped her, and her breath exploded into white clouds.

She bent down to touch the kitten. Her fur was covered with frost, stiff and jagged like the clumps of grass that poked out from the snow drifts in the side yard.

Ava gingerly picked up the kitten’s body, slight, almost weightless, and consumed by cold. She held it close to her, wanting just once to allow warmth and caring hands to touch this creature that had once been alive. Silent sobs came back as she rocked her back and forth, back and forth, the perfectly still body of a brave creature that had never been loved and had had to always, always, make do.