Is the alien meat? Or is meat alien?

When my Siamese cat Salem died, in the throes of death, he moved from the carpeting to linoleum. I knew it then as a generous gift, the accommodation of an animal learned in human ways.

I was broken by the horror of his stiffness when I found him, and the burying. I dreamed old woman cats staring at me from the other
side of the window screen,
heard her cat call screeching across the moonless nights,
felt her watching with yellow rounded eyes.

After I buried him, I drew a candlelit bath and called Susan Morris. Said simply: this call is a funeral for Salem. Without being told she sensed my horror and told me, quite simply as well, the latest story: Ted Quinn killing and eating dog.

Ted is always one to study on the body: at film showings outside of class and in some grad student's apartment, he has sliced raw beef heart, eating it like popcorn, the just-barely-post-adolescent boys genuflecting in the macho aura of it.

Ted is a study of the body: the department chair intervened after yet another faculty party in which Ted had taken off his clothes. Allen Neff cast Ted's deciding tenure vote from his couch, Allen living on that couch surrounded by colleagues who served as family the year he died of cancer. It was the constant and daily smell of goats in heat permeating Ted's office that required a deciding vote.

Ted as body: performed the dog eating act as a community get together, a regular let the good times roll weekend party. Puppy chow, they called it. I spare you, dear virtual reader, the meaty details.

My horror of the familiar and deeply loved turned stiff mitigated by puppy chow theater at a bathtub funeral. Reality is bleeding and I am bumping into invisible architecture.