"It's just one of those things," he explained to me.

One of those things, I thought to myself. The smug bastard. I couldn't believe what he was telling me as he relaxed serenely on his stool, an arm tossed up on the examination table like it should have been holding a cigarette were he not a doctor and were they not good for you. Ah hell, who was I kidding anyway? He wasn't a doctor. He was a vet. They'd saved people's lives but it was usually in a movie like Airport '77 or in television shows like, well like... whatever. But that was fiction. He still didn't care about my plight.

"What the hell do you mean, 'one of those things'," I almost begged the shaggy haired bastard. Why did every vet look like an ex-hippy even if they couldn't be more than in their late twenties?

"Well," he started slowly, looking at me as though I was the one who had gone to "medical" school and that I should have known. I frowned in the interval. "When you back over a cat with a car, they tend to die."

Car or no car, death or no death, I wanted to shave his eyebrows and deny him his facetious looks. To think evolution had spawned a creature like him. Rare were the instances when I thought myself superior in some genetically predisposed way but – prior to my encounter with him – I would have placed money that his genes were bred out long ago. My frown deepened. He had relatively big arms. Probably had a date almost every night which was more than I was going to have after word of this incident got out. Girls tend not to like it when you kill their cats.

“Look,” I tried calmly. “Can’t you use that shocker thing on it? You know, get it to start breathing again?” I was begging. I know that I looked like a mess but there was little I could have done to help that. I felt a lightning bolt of terror run shoot through my spleen and some how knew what she was going to say to me. “We’re finished,” she’d say. “You killed the only thing I ever cared about,” she’d say. “How could you be so careless,” she’d ask and I wouldn’t have a response. There wouldn’t be a damn thing I could say in my defense. I was in the wrong. I killed her cat. I just didn’t want us to end on that kind of note. Better that she should hate me for something else and have her animal to console her.

The vet tried and failed to hide the sneer that his mouth had formed. “You can’t defibrillate that cat,” he told me. I asked why. Why couldn’t he? Did he not like me? Was the cat not worth his time saving? Was it personal? I knew it. He was probably sleeping with my girlfriend and by pinning the death of the her object of affection on me he could more easily whisk her away in his arms. Well, take her, I thought. If you can lift her, take her. “Defibrillation only works when the animal’s heart has stopped. It jump starts the electrical system.”

And?

“And you ran the damn thing over,” he said clearly frustrated. He pointed to the white sheet that covered, well honestly, as much of the thing as I was able to pick up with a shovel. What did I know? I wasn’t trained in the care of house pets. Not like the guy sitting at the table treating me like I should be better informed. I was a product of television for Christ sake. People usually shrug that kind of thing off, so I didn’t think it was fair he was trying to hold me responsible for the whole cat thing. I didn’t even like cats – not that I swerved to hit the poor feline – so how was I to know its strengths and weaknesses?

“Well,” I asked. “What can you do for me?”

“I can cremate it,” he said plainly. “I’m trained in animal medicine but after a certain point, there’s just no helping and this…,” he paused. “…cat, has obviously reached that point.

He wasn’t making me feel any better about things. “Cremate it huh?” He nodded in agreement. “Well, can you at least wrap the box in some nice paper?”

I guess he had reached his limit because – for an instant – as he reached for the pen behind his ear, I was sure he was going to stab me with it. And as I lied there bleeding, unable to speak for the writing instrument protruding though my gullet, my leg twitching gently as life left me, he would have explained to the police that me “committing suicide with his pen” was just “one of those things” and they would have nodded in sullen agreement. Instead, he didn’t stab me and I didn’t bleed, which left no need for an explanation to the police, and there was no nodding anywhere in the room, but rather the simple sentence said in his calm hippy like way. He sat quietly appending a few notes to the end of the cat’s medical chart – probably the last entry ever on a chart with a responsible history dating six years – and ignored me for a little while as he took deep deliberate breaths before looking me in the eye and saying, “Get. The fuck. Out.”