The Stone Boy by Sophie Loubière

He was working his way to a lovely ulcer. Just like his father used to do. Foolish.
    On Sunday, no one appeared in the neighbors’ soggy garden. The shutters remained closed throughout the day. Madame Préau didn’t see the car come out of the garage. Perhaps the family had gone away? When Madame Préau telephoned her son at the end of the day, he refused to put Bastien on the line. At half past seven, she ate a vegetable soup in front of the France 3 national news. The news was pathetic: the threat of a flu epidemic was growing, the release of a video of Brice Hortefeux’s polemical comments was raising an outcry on the left, a collection of school supplies was now being organized for the poorest families, a report showed the dilapidated and insalubrious state of university dormitories, a British artist had found nothing better to do than to put a mold of his head covered with his own blood on show in London. But the regressive aspect of society today designed to shun the values of the Republic was not the source of Madame Préau’s annoyance. She knew that mankind was condemned to die of cancer, poisoned by antibiotics, volatile chemical compounds in paints, preservatives, and parabens in cosmetics, its belly full of its own waste plastic, like an albatross at Midway Atoll in the North Pacific, and she did not care.
    No, what was worrying her was the big, one-eyed tomcat.
    Madame Préau’s garden was a haven for stray animals. No conflict was tolerated. The one-eyed cat had made up his mind to prevent his fellow strays access to the food dishes left near the garden shed. He didn’t care about getting scraped and collecting scars, flaunting them with all the childish arrogance of a dominant male. Recently, an abscess on his left front leg had burst. Blood and pus was seeping from it, dirtying the food dishes. Madame Préau could not approach him to take care of it—he was a really aggressive cat, and the wound only made him worse. So she chased him away when she saw him jump over the garden wall, knowing that at night, when she wasn’t there, he would return to do his worst and win back any territory he decided belonged to him.
    Madame Préau had always taken care of the animals around her. Once an active member of and volunteer for the SPA, she had gone so far as to collect a goat with two broken legs found at a motorway rest stop on the way to Provins and a young baboon rescued from a cosmetics laboratory that had been paying a whopping amount of business tax to the Champagne-Ardenne regional government. But if a despot terrorized and deprived others of their food, even if he was one-eyed and mangy, that was too much to bear.
    She had to do something.
    At eight o’clock, Madame Préau was ready. Positioned in the shed on a stool, hidden under a plastic tarp, she waited until the cat showed the tip of his nose at the jam-packed bowls, shaking a box of cat food to attract him.
    “Come on, come here, you.”
    It took a good quarter of an hour before the lame cat dared to enter the dark shack, inhaling the cat food piece by piece that trailed to the stool where his benefactor stood.
    “Come on, my fat tomcat, come here.”
    Madame Préau’s voice was soft and quavering. He was so close to her that she could feel him purring.
    “I think it’s about time the feast came to an end, young man.”
    The shock of the hammer against the cat’s skull cut the soft purring short.

    15 September 2009
Ms. Blanche,
     
There is currently a rumor in the neighborhood that you engage in strange practices in your ramshackle house. From my bedroom window, I saw you last night, by the light of a pink moon, rocking a cradle in which, according to local residents (so says the butcher), is the body of a dead dog.
     
I should tell you that I am not one of those people who point the finger at others as in times gone by. I do not believe in the modern-day witches the tabloids buy into. I think that if you didn’t forget to wash, and if