not an epidemic

The cull of the cats was an inevitable development once the deaths became plenty if not epidemic, as the hypothesis pertaining to their responsibility spread virulently through the township. The cats spoke not a word but accepted their fate, further fuelling the widespread acceptance of their guilt. The hypothesis explained not why the deaths were occurring, or precisely how the cats were causing them, only that they did, they must, and that the township had a responsibility to stop them for the sake of its own continuance. Council funds were allocated to the cull, with organised teams of huntsmen rewarded in pennies per kilo of cat product returned to the civic buildings. The captured cats writhed and groaned in increasingly hoarse tones in large hemp sacks that were piled on the steps outside of the civic buildings, several hundred cats in total, and much of the township had gathered to witness the cull, considered by all to be humanities great triumph. The mayoral party greeted their people as heroes, and the applause drowned out even the frightened sound of the cats for its duration; they spoke of civic responsibility and of difficult decisions and of the fundamental worth of the human spirit or soul and how the only just response to threat imagined or real was murder. The gathered agreed in the way one does with partly distorted loudspeakers. The mayor’s assistant, an attractive barely beyond the college years, approached the piled cats and carefully poured a combustible liquid of unknown origin from a jerrycan upon them. Ignited, the blaze was staggering and a carnival mood reigned, the sounds terrible from within the sacks that tore like fireballs around the car park with the force of cats desperation. A youngster was holding a single cat by the scruff of its neck, somehow missed by the encroaching huntsmen. Encircled by four of his school friends they held the cat down and took it in turns to stamp on it, its small bones snapping easily beneath their shoes, singing as they did the songs of yore.