Laura Erickson's For the Birds

A little over a year ago, our cat died. Most of the time we don’t think about her anymore, but now and then something triggers a flood of memories and we feel sad all over.

During one of these spells last week, while Tommy, who is 8, was taking some consolation in the idea that Sasha’s spirit was still alive somewhere, we got onto the subject of kitty heaven. Katie, who is 10 and immediately sees the complexity of an issue, pointed out that if there really is a heaven for cats, especially cats who started out as bird hunters like Sasha, kitty heaven should have some birds to catch. Sasha’s favorite birds before we adopted her and put an end to her avicidal ways were redpolls, tasty little morsels whose bustling swarms beneath the feeders were wondrously enticing to a hungry stray cat. After we brought Sasha indoors for good, she pretty much ignored the feeders, but once in a while she’d crouch at the dining room window, her whole body tense, making an odd rattling noise like a distant machine gun. We’d look out, and sure enough, there’d be a flock of redpolls. She’d be agitated for hours, hungry for the excitement and thrill of sneaking up on a quick little bird, snatching it at the moment of takeoff, and sinking her teeth into warm, still-pulsing flesh. Whenever redpolls appeared, Sasha’s eyes pleaded for just one more hunt, but she knew I would never relent. She accepted the terms of her adoption with good grace, but when redpolls were about, the loss of her freedom seemed an especially steep price to pay for regular meals, shelter, and love. Of course in kitty heaven there’d be redpolls for Sasha to chase.

But the cosmic unfairness of this to the redpolls was too much for Tommy, until it occurred to him that the redpolls in kitty heaven might have been very naughty redpolls, and were actually serving their time in redpoll hell. That made sense, until Katie asked what a redpoll could possible do to deserve banishment into redpoll hell. Maybe one of these inoffensive little vegetarians killed an insect one time, but if that were enough to justify eternal condemnation, most of us people would be in big trouble. We racked our brains trying to think of even a very little sin that a redpoll could commit, but we couldn’t come up with a thing.

Finally, Joey, who’s 12 and knows more about the world than his mother, solved the riddle for us. It turns out that kitty heaven involves sophisticated computers. Cats wear virtual reality helmets and sneak up on computer-simulated redpolls to their hearts’ content. Joey also pointed out that in Bald Eagle heaven, eagles catch virtual reality fish, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair to the fish.

Yes! The mystery was solved. Sasha is hunting to her heart’s content in kitty heaven, so Tommy and Katie ran off to play basketball, Joey went off to his room dreamily planning out computer games that cats might enjoy, and I was left to wonder if in redpoll heaven, redpolls eat real birch seeds or merely virtual reality birch seeds.