In years to come, this is how Dayna and Greg will refer to it and when they do, their friends will give them strange looks and say things like ‘you barbecued a cat?’ and ‘the hell did it taste like?’ which will make the two of them roll their eyes. But right now, they are still young and they are here, drinking beer, and their host’s cat is weaving in and out of their legs in that seductive, electric way cats do. The hot fat from the grill has yet to drip off the grill onto the cat’s back, causing it to dart in terror through the fence out into the road where the laundry truck — driven by a guy called Ricky who is on his phone, but who probably wouldn’t have been able to stop in time anyway — has yet to appear. Greg has his strong arm around Dayna, his right thumb teasing the underneath of her breast through the material, the breast that, years from now, will be the source of the trouble not even his strong arm will be able to fix, and he’ll wonder if he shouldn’t have felt something all those years earlier — maybe even at the Cat Barbecue — because these things, he has read somewhere online, start long before you know. But Dayna will get irritated and say if I didn’t know back then, how the fuck were you supposed to know? Though that’s all for the future, and right now it is just a barbecue, not yet even the Cat Barbecue, and the cat is weaving in and out of their legs in that seductive, electric way, and the moon is high and everyone is young.
Photo by Andrew Skudder, used and adapted under CC.
