The pregnant cat managed not only to climb into the hammock, but also to have six kittens in it. It was the worst location in the yard she could have chosen for their birth. In the extreme heat, the latticed rope became oven coils. Two kittens fell through to the ground and died before Olivia realized what had happened. 

Olivia had to drag her aunt Kelly out of the air conditioning to show her what had happened.

Kelly stood staring at the two dead kittens under the hammock for a long moment. “It’s not even that far of a drop,” she said, hand on her hip.

“Well, it was far enough,” Olivia snapped. She didn’t add that Mama Cat wasn’t supposed to be outside at all, since they’d been hitting record highs all week, and that it hadn’t been her who’d left the door open.

“I thought you were supposed to be smarter than this,” Kelly said to Mama Cat.

Mama Cat growled, the four live kittens crawling on her, struggling to stay aloft.

Olivia tried to take a deep breath and nearly choked on it. “The house was too cold,” she started. “I looked it up. Mama Cat was looking for somewhere warm.”

“Careless of her,” Kelly commented. “Very sad.”

Hissing and scratching, Mama Cat wouldn’t let them move the kittens indoors at first. Instead, they used the hammock as a net to lower the cats onto the grass, and then Olivia placed a deck chair over them to create some shade. She set Mama Cat’s water dish next to her and hooked up a fan on the brown lawn, using multiple extension cords. There were eight or more cords hanging in the pantry, enough to wrap around the entire yard several times. Cords, Olivia thought, a little grossed out. Mama Cat must have already bitten off the umbilical cords, balanced somehow in the hammock.

“You never know when some things will come in handy,” Kelly said, pleased, when she saw Olivia hauling out the junk.

After the cats had baked outside for far too long, but Mama Cat was too exhausted to fight, Olivia scooped them all into a cardboard box and carried them into the damp bathroom. It was the smallest, most contained room in the house. She placed Mama Cat on the faded bath mat and tucked the kittens against her nipples. 

Olivia closed the door and went to poke around the kitchen cabinets, pushing aside three open boxes of instant white rice, a dead smartphone, six boxes of brand-name spaghetti, a can of store-brand seafood bisque no one was ever going to eat, and over a dozen tins of wet cat food. 

Nursing mothers needed treats. Olivia had wanted to buy Mama Cat the fancy low-mercury tuna, but not at that price. She drained a can of store brand tuna and dropped it onto the cat plate, which was only a little crusty. Back in the bathroom, she stuck it as close as she could to the mother’s mouth.

Mama Cat growled at Olivia, but eventually she ate.

One of the surviving kittens looked a little droopy and was leaning against the wall of the bathtub. Olivia tried gently placing it closer to its mother’s belly, but it didn’t look up.

Olivia sat in the corner, head wedged between walls, to watch the cats for a while. She was seventeen and had never owned a pet before she and her mom had moved here three years ago (for the high school, her mom had told everyone else. Olivia had borrowed the excuse, too.) Meanwhile, Kelly acted like she’d never had the responsibility of keeping an animal alive, although apparently the number of cats she’d owned throughout history numbered in the double digits.

Kelly shrieked something from the hallway, so Olivia reluctantly stood and opened the door.

“Did you forget there’s only one bathroom in this house? What are you doing in there?” Kelly demanded.

“They need somewhere quiet where the babies can’t get hurt,” Olivia said, fixing her gaze on the floor.

“What’s wrong with the rest of this house?” her aunt asked.

“They’ll get hurt,” Olivia said, pointedly staring at the living room, which could have been the inside of a storage unit. 

Kelly scoffed and pushed past her.

Neither of them looked towards Kelly’s closed bedroom door.

While her aunt used the bathroom, Olivia secretly liberated some of the towels, some still with the original tags attached, from the hall closet for the cats. She wanted to line the entire bathroom floor with soft things.

When her aunt allowed her back in the bathroom, Olivia saw the droopy cat was lying silently apart from the others. Of course Kelly hadn’t said anything. Olivia didn’t want to pick up yet another dead kitten so soon, so she spent a few long minutes lining the floor with the towels she’d brought. Finally, she looked back at the dead kitten. One of the surviving siblings was crawling over it.

Slowly, Olivia knelt and reached out a finger. The body was unpleasantly damp and lukewarm. It didn’t move. 

Mama Cat cried while Olivia wrapped the body in a hand towel. 

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” Olivia said. “Look, there are three left, though. They need you. Drink your water. Eat your food. Look, right there.”

Mama Cat kept meowing sadly.

Olivia sighed. Half gone. She should have checked the back door this morning after Kelly came in from the store. It had hit ninety-nine degrees by ten-thirty.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Olivia repeated, and took the bundle outside. The other two bodies were in a box under a tree in the yard, and when she opened it, she thought it already smelled. She quickly set the third dead kitten down and closed the box. She planned to dig a hole once the sun went down.

Did cats need to be comforted in their grief, or did Mama Cat need time alone? she wondered. Her stomach decided for her, and she headed into the kitchen instead of back to the basement.

They were out of juice, so she mixed hot chocolate powder with cold milk. She took it with her homework to the living room, where she couldn’t sit on the couch since it was stacked with shopping bags full of yarn, secondhand clothes nobody had ever tried on, Easter decorations, and a box of individually packaged chips, which was open, so she took one.

The recliner was mostly clear, so she sat down and started working. When she’d finished her physics problem set, her sort-of chocolate milk, and a bag of cheese puffs, she checked on the cats again. Mama Cat had eaten all of her food, at least, and nobody else was dead yet. 

She was about to go back upstairs to finish up the last of her weekend homework when she remembered the mess on the hammock. If it hadn’t been so hot, she’d put it off, but she considered the smell of the coffin-box, and trudged outside, where she turned on the hose and dragged it over to rinse the afterbirth off the center of the hammock. Although she hung the extension cords back up in the pantry, she left the deck chair standing on the lawn, a little yellow memorial. A pointed finger. 

Later that evening, she was glad she’d made the effort. Once she’d finished her homework, she had to bury the kittens, which was awful, but then she was able to lay down in the hammock, long dried in the afternoon sun. The chair was still on the lawn, of course. Kelly probably hadn’t noticed.

She wanted to stop thinking about the three kittens she’d just had to put in the ground. If she were an influencer, she’d be filming herself, voice bravely warbling through a narration of the day’s events. A tear would roll down her cheek, elegantly smearing her mascara and slowly wiped away with a manicured finger. Since she wasn’t an influencer, she stared at an airplane’s cloud tail for a few seconds before scrolling through videos by people who were.

The neighbor who had graduated high school last year pedaled by on his bike on his way to the factory second shift. A cop car rolled by a few minutes later, followed by an ATV, a motorcycle, and several trucks. The thick, wet air popped with HVACs struggling to kick on and off.

Eventually, Jessica, Olivia’s mother, arrived home from work, dropped off by a coworker. Olivia sank further into the hammock, even though it wouldn’t make her invisible. She imagined the way she looked from a distance, a lumpy, person-shaped bundle. 

She stayed out in the hammock as long as possible. Kelly was suffocating her. Her mother was suffocating her. The house was suffocating her. Literally. She had developed all the symptoms of a mold allergy since they moved in. Literal, actual, provable suffocation. And nobody cared. 

But it wasn’t their house.

Never was that more clear than when Kelly started banging on the bathroom door whenever anybody else went in there, or grumbled about whatever you tried to put on the T.V.

The possibility of leaving; the possibility of never leaving.

The fact that there were people in your life that you just had to deal with until one of you died was unbearable. It hurt her face just thinking about it, and her phone wasn’t distracting enough to make the ache stop, so she rolled out of the hammock, tipping her feet onto the ground.

There weren’t many rooms in the house, but there were still places she would never enter. She knew it could have been a lot worse. With the cats, there could have been feces and urine everywhere. Feline or human, really, from what she had seen on shows and whatever. But all the living creatures in the house used a toilet or a litter box. 

She’d peeked into Kelly’s room once, and that had been the only time since moving in that she’d really lost her temper with her mom. Did they really have no other option than to stay with a relative like this? This woman slept on the floor of her own bedroom. The bed was occupied. It was taken. And besides Kelly’s creepy bedroom, they had to use a laundromat, because the washer and dryer in the basement were so covered in junk—and mold—that they weren’t usable.

Olivia left the probably-still-dangerous heat and entered the house. Enough stuff was piled in the living room that she could slip into the recliner without anyone in the kitchen seeing her, but her mother would still know she had come inside. A roach fled into a wall when it saw her coming. Olivia sat down and waited.

Jessica peeked her head around the stacked plastic bins, which were draped with crocheted blankets and plastic leis. “Hi, honey.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Relaxing?”

“I have more homework.”

“There were packages on the porch when I got home today.”

Olivia stared.

“It’s not that hard to bring in a couple boxes for your aunt, you know.”

“Okay.”

“What do you even do around here?” Jessica smiled as if she were joking. “Come help me microwave the dinners.”

In the kitchen, Jessica sat at the table, scrolling on her phone and opening the packages of spinach and chicken and handing them to Olivia, who then had to pick the boxes back up and check the cook times on each. 

Kelly wandered in to watch. “Somebody on my Buy Nothing group asked for sheets,” she announced. “I had some I thought she could use. I sent a couple pictures, but she never responded. That’s not very grateful.”

“Or kind,” agreed Jessica.

“Or kind,” Kelly echoed. “You have to know how to find the deals.” She crossed her arms expectantly. 

Jessica waited a beat before prompting, “Were they on sale?”

“I got three sets seventy-five percent off. They weren’t on clearance yet but I had three coupons.” She went into more specifics about the coupons’ parameters, but Olivia zoned out.

Everyone scooped the food onto their plates, handling the trays with the tips of their fingers. Olivia ate standing at the counter because there wasn’t enough room at the table. 

“What’s bothering you?” Jessica asked Olivia. Just when she was starting to think her mother didn’t notice anything.

Kelly said, “Mama Cat had the kittens.”

“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Jessica asked.

“They’re in the bathroom, if you want to see?” Olivia challenged. Jessica didn’t move. “There are three left. Three died.” She explained about the hammock.

“You buried them already? How do you know they were dead?” Jessica asked.

Olivia gaped, sucked in her breath. She felt like she’d been punched, so she took her plate and fork to the recliner.

But after dinner, Kelly said, “Let’s show your mom the kittens!” She made a big show of putting together a plate of fresh tuna.

In the bathroom, Jessica acted fake, too, squealing, “So tiny!” 

“Yeah, they’re cute,” Kelly said. She reached out a hand to pet the closest kitten.

Olivia blocked her aunt with her own hand. “No! You have to wait a week.”

“Haven’t you been touching them all day?” ask Jessica, in a don’t-talk-to-your-aunt-that-way tone.

Olivia made a frustrated sigh. “Yeah, because I had to! They don’t need her now.”

“Are those my towels?” Kelly asked sharply.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t ask!” Kelly half-shrieked at her.

“They’re your cats,” Olivia pointed out.

Kelly rolled her eyes and left. Her stomping was probably more due to her chronic pain than any real sense of annoyance with Olivia, but she still glared at her aunt’s back.

“Mama Cat is looking a little tired, isn’t she?” Jessica asked.

“Kelly left the door open. Mama Cat shouldn’t have been outside.”

“She didn’t do it on purpose, Ollie.”

“She doesn’t do anything on purpose,” Olivia snapped.

Jessica frowned. “What does that mean?”

Olivia dug her fingers into the plush towel on the floor.

Her mom said, “You don’t know what’s in someone else’s heart.”

Olivia stayed silent.

Jessica looked around the room. “We should really clear some of this crap out. Babies crawl on everything. They’re going to hurt themselves at some point.” But she went upstairs, too.

✷

That night, Olivia lay on her twin bed under more crocheted blankets, thinking about her mom’s question: How did she know the cats were dead? She kept seeing the three little kittens rolled up in their washcloths and hand towels, side by side in the cardboard box from one of Kelly’s online orders.

There was no point in digging up the grave. If they weren’t dead when she buried them, she’d have killed them by now. But if she investigated, at least she would know if it was her fault. 

When Jessica entered the bedroom, her phone’s flashlight shone brightly for two solid minutes as she rummaged around in her duffel bag. They had never unpacked their suitcases because they weren’t allowed to open the dressers or the closet. A bunch of stuff that Kelly' s son, James, had left when he moved out was still in there. Kelly never heard from him, even though she called him every day. He’d spent his entire teenagehood dipping into increasingly risky situations, and then left his toxic waste dump of a home at seventeen. He never answered, as far as Olivia knew. Kelly’s unconditional hope meant that Olivia and Jessica lived out of bags and shower caddies and the top of the dresser, which they had split evenly. There was a five-by-five unit in their old town that still held everything from their last apartment, if Jessica was still paying the bills on time.

Jessica creaked into the twin next to Olivia’s and rearranged all her blankets. Olivia pretended to be asleep, the way she usually was, the unending rustling and flashlight waking her up partially and giving her bad dreams.

It must be past midnight by now, although Olivia didn’t look at her phone. 

Better to sleep now. There was no point in knowing. 

Don’t check, it would be impossible to check. 

Her mother was breathing the heavy way she did when she slept. Time to go. Olivia slid onto the floor and crawled out of the room. In the hallway, she stole a camping lantern from an unopened bug-out bag.

After shutting the back door as quietly as possible, she retrieved the shovel, still dirty from the afternoon’s grave-digging. In a pair of Kelly’s too-big rubber mules, she hobbled through the damp, pebble-strewn lawn to the tree where she’d buried the box. 

There was no point in digging and no point in knowing. 

She stuck the tip of the shovel into the ground that she’d patted down hours earlier. Flicked the dirt into the air. Kept going.

She dug up all the loose soil she had used to fill in the grave, but the box was nowhere in sight. There couldn’t be further to go, though, she thought—everything below this was hard, packed. Was this the right spot? She glanced around the yard. It couldn’t have been anywhere else. So further she went, down into earth that probably hadn’t been uncovered since the Jurassic Period, or at least since the first Jurassic Park movie came out. 

Her shovel finally struck something, but instead of the box of kittens, she found empty chip bags, stacks of fifteen-year-old magazines, expired boxes of cake mix, broken garden gnomes, clean glass jars that had previously held gravy or jelly or pickles, a package of plastic cups, college brochures she thought she’d trashed, grab bags of clothes from the annual church bazaar, a lamp without a shade, several hundred pencils, exercise weights, bananas so old they had melted into sludge, half a dozen half-used bottles of shampoo, and three pairs of bowling shoes. She wasn’t shoveling dirt anymore, just solid junk.

The hole went down so far that eventually she had to jump into it to reach the bottom. Her feet crunched as she landed on water bottles, Christmas decorations, porcelain dolls. The hole was wide enough that she could swing the shovelfuls of dirt over her shoulder, deep enough she had to throw them up over her head. Maybe she should have called that phone number, what was it, the know-before-you-dig phone number, it was getting that serious. How had it gotten so enormous? How long had she been out here in the chilly darkness? But she had to keep digging, she had to know if the cats had actually been alive when they were dead.

Her mind wrested itself from her body, a forced disassociation from the grave robbing. She wasn’t cold, only numb. It was disgusting that the little kittens, who had lived hours, minutes, were far, far below the ground in the dark. Why had she buried them so far?

If anyone put her in a grave like this when she died, she would be so pissed off. She and her best friend had talked about it once. They wanted to be shot off into space in a rocket like a billionaire and to come back as a meteor shower. Supposedly your ashes burnt up when they hit the atmosphere, which was what her best friend wanted, but Olivia was confident her dust would break through and shower a perfectly irritating amount onto someone’s roof. 

There really was no end to this hole.

For the first time, she allowed herself to think about Kelly’s bed, from the one time three years ago when she’d glanced into the room. On it had been a six-foot-long bag, which didn’t smell but still looked humanoid in shape. She thought about the fact that she didn’t know whether Kelly was really dialing James every day, when she called him in her room, with the door closed. 

Just when she’d decided she’d never buried the kittens at all, that she’d made it all up, her shovel hit the box, the flimsy coffin she’d buried just a few hours earlier. She loosened it from the dirt, opened the top panels, and checked.

Then she nodded to herself, carefully fit the flaps together again, set the box behind her, and kept digging. She went on, burrowing past the level of the worms, past the grubs, past the beetles, filling the yard with piles of dirt and the things they couldn’t call garbage.