Animals: “Grief Strays” by Meg Cass
Grief Strays
The year we move in together, the city reports record numbers of grief strays. They are the size of large house cats with dirty pink fur. People say they look like possums, like mountain lions, like dogs, like a combination of these. We all agree they smell like loss. Like the perfumes of certain loved ones, hospital waiting rooms, the oysters that used to grow in the oceans, the family bakeries gentrified out of existence.
Like your ex’s challah just pulled from the oven. Like my ex’s pine candles on a rainy afternoon. The cloves your childhood best friend smoked at her last birthday party. The Febreze my first crush used on her hockey gear (we would have dated if I’d been out to myself). The men’s cologne you would have worn in high school if your parents hadn’t called it ‘too boyish.’ The city I fell for before this one, all humidity and fried fish.
They’re thickest in summer, skulk in the alleys, yawn on front lawns, scavenge restaurant dumpsters like rats. They have long, fleshy tails and hairy, pointed ears. They’re embodied, and also not, like how the word stray is both a noun and a verb. When the mayor sends her grief control team to collect them, they turn to pink fog and disperse. Yet some can’t get past a three-foot fence. They eat garbage, puke and shit on people’s cars, on their front porches, in their well-made beds. Their shit is Pepto-Bismol pink and acidic, saps the green from gardens and parks and golf courses. We wear medical gloves to clean it off, put it in official containers marked “grief waste.” The mayor’s team disposes of these in the river deemed too polluted for swimming. There are legends of a grief monster lurking in the green-brown depths. They say it’s the size of a whale, the shape of a cartoon ghost with many small, sharp teeth, that it devours those who get too close to shore. How else to explain the many disappearances we’ve had lately, people who seemed so healthy, so productive, so healed?
Usually, they’re nocturnal. During the day, we make ourselves forget them, work with our headphones on in different parts of our rental house. I have a job with a custom embroidery company, embellish hats and dresses and suits for expensive bar mitzvahs and weddings. You enter hospital account data into spreadsheets, paint inside the cracks of free time. Your still lifes are sports trophies and figurines you find at the thrift store, queer with button ups, boots, undercuts. I love the flecks of gold you add at the end. We tell ourselves the strays won’t find us here, in this bright, our walls coral, butter yellow and sea green.
Still, when I take out the trash, I catch myself squinting down the alley, scanning the honeysuckle for their big, red eyes. I tell myself to keep moving. There are many ways to be productive: finish my latest assignment, another denim jacket embroidered with blackberries and the bride’s new name; listen to a podcast about my ADHD and try to be better; call my friend Felix and bitch about our work and gush about the art we’re excited for and plan a queer cooking night.
Why surveil for grief when joy is right in front of me? You thrift me antique beads and insect pins to sew into my own creations, take me to the best swimming holes, make me cum with your fingers in the blue green water. I peel you satsumas when you work late, go down on you in the attic above our favorite club while our friends dance downstairs, find tickets for your favorite band. We feast on meals full of fresh vegetables, snack on tart cheeses with homemade crackers. We talk about our strays like distant cousins, annoying and sometimes compelling but not especially relevant to who we are now.
“Well, you’ll have to go deeper eventually,” Felix tells me over dive bar gin and tonics.
I’ve just had a bad phone call with my parents. It’s been rocky since I came out the second time. They know I’m on T, but they keep asking if I have a cold, if that’s why my voice is that way. “I didn’t choose this. To have a child like you,” my father said today.
I cried, then texted Felix instead of you: I know you’ve got a big show coming up. “It just hasn’t been the right time,” I explain. “We’ve only been together a year.”
“That doesn’t seem like a short time,” he says, takes a long sip of his drink.
The rich claim to evade their strays. They have additional residences far from here, by the ocean, by the mountains. Their grief loses track of them, confused by their shuttered windows and empty driveways. By the time they catch up, it’s time to shift location again. The flickering pink animals recede to wherever they go when they aren’t haunting us, a place the city has tried to find via expensive trackers that inevitably wind up littering the streets covered in pink slime.
We could all live grief free, the rich say, if we lived in alignment with our true selves. If we would simply move into the developments the city granted tax abatements for, glassy cubes full of greige, one structure indistinguishable from the next, outward embellishments banned in order to throw off any sorrow hunting you.
We didn’t grow up rich. Still, our parents believed in grief avoidance. Each room was baby gated in case a stray slipped inside. When one did, we acted as if there wasn’t a snarling, puffed up loss trying to push through the white plastic bars. “Ignore it and it’ll go away,” my parents assured. “They thrive off your attention.” Yet one night, awake with some bad dream, I walked into their bedroom and saw one the size of a puma clawing at my father’s naked chest. There were many small cuts in his skin like an indecipherable language. The stray was caterwauling, and my father was weeping, both sounds otherworldly and unprecedented. The room smelled of my grandfather’s famous tomato plants. Downstairs I could hear my mother cleaning the kitchen with the radio on. “Get out!” my father shouted. I shut the door behind me. Back in bed, my nightgown still held the scent of tomato leaves, like soil and lushness, like late summer in a garden that no longer existed. I was grateful it never came out. My mother had every fancy, anti-stray detergent: Fresh Start, New Day, Flourish.
Once, your family pretended for an entire dinner that there wasn’t a stray stretched across the table shedding hair in the food. It mostly stared at your mother, smelled like the skating rink where your aunt used to work, taught you scratch spins and waltz jumps. That day they’d switched her from chemo to palliative. Your mother cleared the plates before you finished your chicken cutlet, did not grill you like usual about your schoolwork or how you wore too many polos instead of cardigans or how you spent too much time with your best friend, that kid with blue nail polish and pants that also looked too much like skirts. Eventually, the creature jumped down and took a giant shit on the kitchen floor. “She cleaned it up.Then we all watched the football game,” you told me with a laugh, your gaze wandering out our bedroom window that looks onto the backyard. I watched you get up, pull the homemade curtain closed.
The mayor won her election through a tough-on-grief platform. She says she fought the biggest, nastiest stray of all after her husband was killed in a robbery. For her, this issue is personal. It is now illegal to have more than one stray on your premises at once (no one enforces this). There are new fines for uncleaned grief shit in public view (only the poor are fined for this). The mayor’s team leaves rat poison out in neighborhoods defined as ‘high grief concentration,” neighborhoods like ours full of small houses and yards decorated with dollar store knick-knacks. If people’s pets eat the poison and die, the city is not liable—everyone should be aware of the leash laws.
In the mornings, we study the evidence of stray activity. A dead uncle’s irises ripped from their beds, arranged on the doorstep like a nest; the car someone’s sister was learning to drive full of tufts of pink fur and dead squirrels; the new queer novel your childhood best friend never got to read, would have loved, smoldering in our fire pit; the high school journals I’d put in the trash, spread open on the yard like birds shot down from the sky. We wonder how the strays procure these objects. They are inventive and mysterious in their ways, know us too well. While I embroider, you attend to whatever your grief left behind. After you get back to painting, I attend to mine. This system seems like it could work for a while.
We both know it’s different in winter. Our city goes grey, is wracked with cold rain. We don our softest clothes, tunnel into our warmest places. The strays want to be there, too. Ours whine and howl for entrance at night and sometimes even during the day. It’s like they are like vampires, need to be invited to come in. They make the loneliest sound, as if they are trapped deep in an icy lake. When I leave the house to mail work orders, mine press their bodies against me, their scents blending together, my high school boyfriend’s mildewy basement and my ex-fiancé’s cigarettes and my oldest friend’s garlicy kitchen and my father’s car and others I can’t immediately identify. They are both creepy and cute, with their wide, pale pink faces and furry paws. I hiss at them to leave me alone, my chest heavy with memory.
At dusk, I glimpse yours huddled beneath our front porch. They’re quiet and so still, do not blink when I get closer. They have long snouts and whiskers. I catch notes of vanilla body oil and cream bleach on the air. It feels wrong to approach them further without your consent, but I want to know what they’re like, how they move, the clouds of past lives they exude. I can’t help asking, one night in the middle of January, “What if we let them in for just an hour? Just in the kitchen?”
You say it doesn’t work that way. There’s no telling what they’ll ruin, likely all we’ve made together, our carefully thrifted furniture, some of which still smells of other people’s strays, our walls covered in our friends’ artwork, our lush spider plants and monsteras. Your creatures have especially long claws, you say. And there are so many. For starters, there’s how she could have lived and how she might have loved you and how you might have loved her, as friends, as lovers, maybe as friends again years later.
You’ve spent a decade evading them, working fourteen-hour days, creating each painting with meticulous precision. And you refuse to be like your mother who, since your father left, has given her strays full run of her house. Each night, she drinks a bottle of wine, commands them to gouge at her body. She wears thick sweatshirts in every season, flinches at the slightest touch. She says life is nothing more than what we lose, what comes back to us monstrous and sharp. “Why not leave things as they are,” you tell me, a steady inconvenience as opposed to an unmanageable crisis. You haven’t had a single scratch in years.
It sounds reasonable. I’ve fed my strays sedatives coated in peanut butter and sent them back into the night. I’ve started and stopped a dozen emails to my oldest friend, who I’ve fought with about politics too many times. I’ve exercised until my lungs burned and taken on extra commissions and had black out sex with strangers and dated cruel straight men all to distract me, then I’ve shot every kind of liquor to forget the treatment I accepted.
These days, it’s harder to move in the mornings after only two drinks. It’s harder to make myself undo what my strays have done in the night. While you’re working, I read through my old journals, remember the days my high school boyfriend did things to my body I didn’t want, days I blocked out, lost to myself. I tell you the story of my oldest friend, a story of almost-romantic-love and growing apart, the cop she married when we turned thirty.
You say, have you thought of making a piece about this? You say, how is that residency app going? I don’t blame you. I’ve said these things to myself countless times. I watch your hands press the knees of your paint-smattered jeans, then take out your phone, open the new app all the artists are using to promote themselves. There is always something beautiful for us there.
It is true that ignored long enough, a specific stray won’t come back for months, sometimes years. We can tell ourselves it is gone forever. But in the middle of the night, we know they are still out there, hear their strange sounds that pierce the most expensive ear plugs. The wind slips into our houses with traces of their scents. People toss and turn, try alcohol and sex and the pricey grief meditation apps that play oceans and thick forests that exist just out of our reach, full of sea turtles and manatees and whales and owls and wolves and creeks.
There are stray-home-specialists who, for no small fee, will rework your living spaces to welcome them in, show you how to leave certain drawers open, others closed, what to let them play with and what to put on a high shelf, how to arrange the furniture so no one feels trapped. There are trainers who claim they can make strays docile, the kinds of creatures who curl up on laps and fall asleep during movies, parties, marriages.
And there are grief readers who say the strays themselves aren’t the problem but the systems and policies and laws that take from us who and what we love, take us from ourselves, deny us time to mourn. The readers focus on the bereaved, who they say are all of us, to some degree. They explore what to do when your strays inevitably crap in your favorite shoes, attack your favorite people, destroy your computer while you’re in the middle of applying to jobs and degree programs, refuse to leave even though you were sure you were on the final step of the city’s recommended three-step healing process and now you could go back to who you were before or step into the life you should have always had. They ask you to listen to your strays, feed them, care what they want.
Many of these people are bullshit, but some are of help. When Felix’s mother vanishes beside the river, her rhinestoned chucks left behind on shore, we book the one he requests. We also raise money so he can take off more than the allotted three days. The reader shows up to his house with dried herbs and tarot cards in a pink velvet bag. Their hair is neon green and shorn close to their lined face. Tattoos of spiders and zodiac signs cover their scarred arms. They come during the day, just after sunrise. We leave to give them space, return that night to find a dozen strays in Felix’s apartment. They are gathered around Felix, some are large, some small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. People have tried to theorize correlations between stray size and level of grief and passage of time, but the data is never consistent enough to prove anything. We only know they are unpredictable, can always surprise us with their anger, their messiness, their ability to seep through a crack beneath the door, to suddenly shrink or expand, to fill an entire house with their smell.
Felix’s strays drip pink ooze from their eyes and mouths, as new strays often do. When they come close, we feed them from the bowl of cinnamon snails Felix made with his mother’s recipe. They are messy eaters, trail crumbs across the floor, but they seem to appreciate the snack. We ask Felix to tell us about them, why one smells of burning plastic and another like campfire. We try not to take it personally when one of them snaps at us, growls, bites our ankles, hard when we try to go home. Some of us spend the night.
“I would do this for you,” I say when I get home, the forsythia joy of living with you still poking through my chest. Or we could invite ours into my car, bring them to one of the cooking nights. While we fold dumplings or chop vegetables for a giant soup or layer lasagnas to last us for the week ahead, they could congregate in the backyard with other people’s strays, sniff and paw and bite at each other or come inside and sulk in the corners of the room or roar in unsettling ways or fuck some shit up. We’d work with it as a group.
You squint at me like I’m a distant movie screen, run a hand through the new haircut that makes you stand a little taller, close cropped on the sides. “This is a conversation I can’t have right now. I’ve got an exhibition in three weeks. I’m sorry, I—”
“Well, I need to see mine. Inside.” Each word is hard to say, like there’s a long-haired stuck in my throat.
Your face softens. You’re wearing the jean jacket I made you with the werewolf and the phases of the moon stitched on the back. “Of course, I want you to have what you need. Let’s just try to not let it get too heavy around here. Let’s keep having fun.”
Awake at night, I wonder if some people can sense when they’re part of someone else’s stray. My parents have told me of one that came to their front door smelling of my old raspberry body wash, my fuchsia prom dress that my mother had dropped at the thrift store in its mouth. “I feel like I’m losing my daughter,” my mother said. “Can you just slow down with the changes?”
Felix’s ex once texted demanding he remove one from their bedroom. It smelled like the roller rink they went to on their first date. Felix refused, correctly we all think. We can feed other peoples’, introduce them to ours, even speak to them, but they aren’t ours to control.
One night while you’re at a friend’s opening downtown—every weekend you go to several, then the afterparties—I call Felix. “Do you think I should just do it? I feel like they’ll get annoyed.”
I can hear his strays in the background, some snarling, some purring, some hissing. It’s been two months since he lost his mother, who everyone thought had been doing better with the new meds.
“You shut them out, you shut your own self out. You know this,” he says. His voice is flat with exhaustion, but steady.
I picture his apartment, the strays lounging on chairs and couches covered in the rainbow crochet blankets Felix asked us to make for them, the piles of pink shit on floor he hasn’t gotten to yet, the windows open to the cold night. “I’ll be over tomorrow to help you clean,” I say.
“Thanks, hon. And I can come over next week to meet yours if you want. I could use a break from this mess.”
“I would love that,” I say.
I take a deep breath, light the special pink candle another friend sent me. Then I open our back door and call my strays to me like another old friend. They are tentative at first, appear from behind the back shed, startle when I step closer. Then they rush inside all at once nearly knocking me over. Their fur is every shade of pink, is coming off some of them in patches as if they’ve gnawed at themselves. I wonder if it’s from me shouting at them, for decades: If I was a better person, more resilient, more self-loving, more self-confident, you’d vanish.
They look freezing and too thin. I fight the urge to flee, or to shew them back outside. There are too many to count, too many scents fighting with each other to name any of them, too many to care for. I fear they will combine into one creature, pin me to the ground, suffocate me, rip me open with their many small teeth.
You warned me about this. There is a reason, you said, why the city now instructs us to deadbolt our doors at all hours, has suggested bars for all windows, sticky traps for front porches which only collect trash and dead leaves. You understand where it comes from, the mayor’s latest anti-stray policy, no sharing meals or playing music in the public parks for fear our strays will gather around in troubling numbers, why people are treated as more of a nuisance than the creatures themselves. Containment, eradication, more development, the mayor promises on the news, her pearl necklace glinting, her blond hair cut into a perfect bob. Then we’ll all heal. That word, which every day sounds more like obedience.
I sit on the floor and a creature that smells like vinegar lemon—my mother’s homemade cleaning solution—settles on the ground next to me. Another that smells like my father’s salami and eggs on Saturday mornings joins it. It’s hard to keep breathing. I ask them what they want. They put their faces next to my face. Their breath is hot, and their claws dig into my thighs. I curse, but do not kick them away. They emit low, guttural whines that make my skin itch, then settle on the couch and eye me warily. I bring out Oreos, all of our favorite cookie. They demolish the entire box. I play Joni Mitchell on my phone, the song my mother loved in high school. Their eyes glint in recognition. Then they cross the room and vomit on a book of queer erotica I’d meant to put away. My hands shake as I pick it up, wipe it clean with a damp rag. I close my eyes, take a moment to remember where I am: a butter yellow room I love, a large hoop I’m working on beside me, a gift for a friend, full of strawberries and beans and one large vulva. When I open them again, the smells linger but the strays have hidden somewhere else in the house or gone back into the night, for now. My body feels drained, but also very awake. I drink a big glass of water.
The next stray smells of my high school boyfriend’s orange gum. Another conjures my high school soccer bag, musty and like fresh cut grass. These two seem larger than the others, bear rotting teeth. In their hisses I hear get it together, fix it, get it right, and I’m fine, I’m fine, yes, yes. I think of my seventeen-year-old-self pretending pleasure while pain ripped through them. I imagine what adolescence could have been, if I’d been in my body more. How I might have created and loved and made mistakes and moved.
I go upstairs for the good, flannel blanket my oldest friend gave me years ago, fold it up on the loveseat. The strays stare at it for a while then nestle in. I show them our bowl of satsumas with the leaves still on, let them sniff. Their fur is soft like the new hair on my legs. They cry for a long time, a sound like dogs locked in too-small kennels. Tears leak all over the floor, hot as wax. Soon I am crying too.
One by one, they come to me. I try to notice their details, what makes them unique and also like other strays I’ve met or heard about from my friends. They are beautiful and ugly, awkward and sleek. They waddle and leap, burrow in fear with their ears flat and luxuriate. The one that smells like stale popcorn—like my ex-fiancé’s apartment—keeps trying to balance on the windowsill and falling off. I can’t help laughing. Grief can always be a little ridiculous.
I think about why my particular griefs stray. The losses that don’t fit inside official modes of mourning, that won’t be contained in the boxes and drawers of but no one died, and it wasn’t a divorce so and that was so long ago and have you tried working harder at your job, at your art. The sorrow that I’ve un-homed, that I’ve told has no place in my life which must always move cleanly forward. The city has words for what I am doing tonight: maladaptive, disordered, unproductive.
But the wildness of my strays is delicious. They knock down books I haven’t opened in years. I pick them up and find words that spark in my chest. They have me playing pop songs I’d kept sealed off in different lives. I still know how to sing along. My strays bring regret and pain and also the smells of a forest six states away after a storm, of logs covered in lichen and polypore mushrooms, of a seaweedy beach from my early twenties, long swallowed by the rising waves. They bring me to my knees, make me want to leave my skin, fill me with wonder. I see their names in chanterelles and shells and spiders. This space to know them, the city would take from me, has taken from me, from all of us, to some degree.
Blue light seeps through the windows. I wait for you to return to what is still our home, to see if you will get overwhelmed, hand me a sketch pad and go back into your busy world, or if you will keep walking towards me, be still with me with these beings that are and are not me, who must live with us now. I wonder when you’ll hold your own creatures in your arms. I wonder if I’d be able to keep my promise, or if you’d even want me to. There’s a scratching at the door. It’s soft at first, then grows more adamant. A scent I don’t want to name crackles on the air. I watch myself get up, turn all our locks. I’m not ready to know you this way.
About Meg Cass
Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer and teacher who lives in St. Louis. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared in Ecotone, Foglifter, and Passages North. Their flash fiction has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 and in the SmokeLong Quarterly Best of the First 10 Years Anthology. They co-founded Changeling, a queer reading series focused on works-in-progress, and teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois Springfield.
