501 S

My father tells me, on the bright side, if my mother doesn’t get better, at least the insurance policies they’ve taken out will set us up for quite a while and pay for a new house and my college and a sporty little hot-rod for his fictional twenty-something girlfriend and while we laugh and spitball ideas, I can’t stop thinking about a cat - a kitten - I saw on 501 S years before and how its back was mangled and twisted like a wrung out washcloth and how it still managed to lift its head and mew at the cars careening by, and how I was sweating bullets because no one was stopping to help it, because I wasn’t stopping to help it, and if anyone wanted to do anything - scrape it off the pavement or feel that brief bump as the tires crushed its skull - they’d have to go ten miles down and ten miles back, making U-turns in heavy traffic, just for the split-second chance to change anything.

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H.S. Easterbrook is an unpublished writer and recent graduate of Randolph College’s new low-residency MFA program, with a focus in Fiction. He lives in Forest, Virginia with his wife, Hayley - also a Randolph College MFA graduate.