The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors

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When I was a child growing up in a small city, seeing animals flattened at the roadside was a common occurrence. Frequently they would be wild creatures such as birds, squirrels, rats and even the odd hedgehog. But sometimes they were larger animals and clearly beloved pets: cats, for example, or rabbits which had managed to escape the confines of their hutch and garden only to be hit by cars; sad metaphors for the idiom ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’.

I don’t seem to witness this phenomenon any more. Just like custard and scraped knees, the majority of roadkill in my life seems to have been experienced before I reached double figures. But, despite its regularity, there’s still one case I remember in particular.

It was a cat, at the point of the road where the tarmac meets the kerb, and unlike most roadkill◦– squashed, two-dimensional testaments to the fleeting nature of life◦– this one was still fairly intact and, I hoped, perhaps alive. On closer inspection the injury was mainly confined to the cat’s head. One eye was closed and slightly encrusted with dried blood. The other, like an early Looney Tunes animation, was wide open and popping out of the socket as though it had seen something alarming. It probably had: the car speeding towards it.

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