Thirst by Ken Kalfus

unhappy with the odor of its litter box under my desk, and I myself would have been pleased to get rid of the animal. Then one wet Saturday afternoon it died.
    It was a peculiar time in my life. The cat died, and I had to take it to a vet just to dispose of the body. Two weeks later I broke up with my girlfriend, cruelly, for almost no reason except to see what it would be like, and a month after that I dropped out of school. I felt this enormous freedom—I was an adult!—but had no idea what to do with it, and I ended up working the next three years for a travel agency.
    I now infrequently return to the neighborhood, which is mostly inhabited by strangers. The descendants of the cats we knew still roam its nights, but there seems to be fewer of them, and I wonder if I overestimated their numbers when I was a child. The pond has been filled in and replaced by a very small shopping center that, to judge by its empty storefronts and cracked parking lot, will soon be abandoned. I am married now, with my own children, and I have a job that sometimes requires brutality, in a quiet, nine-to-five way. I take my children to parks, watch TV with them, and help them with their homework. I try to be sure they are kind to animals, but you can never be sure of anything. Like the rest of us, they’re on their own.

The Republic of St. Mark, 1849
    “Many discoveries which we laugh at as childish
and fantastic later vindicate themselves.”
    —An eyewitness
     
     
    A lessandro Cacciaguida has been dying all his life, indeed from the moment of conception, but in the last week he has died more than in all the preceding weeks of his life, and in the last day more than in all the preceding days. In a matter of hours his fall to the earth will be completed, and he will be a body at rest. Charles Albert has abandoned the Republic. Marshal Haynau holds all passage to our city. Cholera has left corpses rotting in the gutters and floating in the canals, and whoever among Venice’s living has the strength to eat does not have any food. Now what is required of the enemy is patience.
    All the members of Alessandro’s household are either dead or gone from the city; he does not recall their individual fates. Of his servants, the last to remain was Maria, his wife’s maid. Maria died two nights before, while he was washing her befouled body he had once so lightly enjoyed. Now he walks through his house for the last time, virtually a ghost, running his hands along the spines of his books, an oil painting of his son, and a small
escritoire that was given to him by an ancestor and will soon be either hacked to bits or sold to some Viennese merchant who has no known ancestor of his own. His head spinning, Alessandro passes from the house and his courtyard, too feeble to shut a door or gate.
    If some bandit laid a dagger in his chest, then Alessandro would at least see his killer’s eyes. Now, he is being slain invisibly by the Venetian businessmen who have maneuvered our city into fighting this war without allies, the Venetian politicians whose ineptitude at diplomacy is surpassed only by their ineptitude at war, the Austrian generals who have never seen his face, and this dread wasting disease that turns a man into shit.
    Alessandro’s house is on a shady lane; the coolness under the trees mocks his fever. The lane opens onto the Campo San Angelo, which is as deserted as it might have been three hours before dawn a year ago. A dog noses a pile of offal. Something smaller scurries from one gutter to the other. All the shops are padlocked. Alessandro rests against a cool, whitewashed wall. He thinks, well, this is where I will die, after a lifetime of speculation about the place and the date, in the Campo San Angelo, against a wall belonging to Girolamo Biaggio, whose family has known mine for three hundred years, and who hasn’t spoken to me in two, because of a dispute about a patch of weedy pasture near Mestre. Alessandro cannot remember