Countdown--The Top 20 Jack Ketchum Works of Short Fiction--#15

 



[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]


#15. "Returns"

This 2002 piece (collected in Closing Time and Other Stories) reveals yet another side to the multifaceted Jack Ketchum: the animal lover.  The story's anonymous protagonist comes back from the beyond (four days after being mowed down by a New York City cab driver), "knowing there was something I had to do or try to do."  Upon returning to his apartment, though, he finds that his alcoholic wife Jill has been neglecting Zoey, his beloved cat.  Thinking that perhaps the purpose of his visitation is to help snap Jill out of her drunken funk, the narrator tries to rouse her to attend to Zoey (unlike the cat, Jill can't see her late husband's spectral self, but hears him inside her head).  And fails miserably.

That's largely because Jill already has different plans for Zoey.  The plurality of the story's title comes into play when a stranger bearing a cat-carrier rings the doorbell.  He is reluctant to carry out the deed he's been summoned for, telling Jill that the cat could be put up for adoption for a while rather than being sent straight to death by euthanasia. Cold and malicious, Jill lies that Zoey is a biter and a fighter, and thus unfit for domestic existence.

Jill's callous act is the ultimate betrayal for the narrator, who rages at the miserable widow with ghostly vitriol:

My wife continues to drink and for the next three hours or so I do nothing but scream at her, tear at her.  Oh, she can hear me, all right.  I'm putting her through every torment I can muster, reminding her of every evil she's ever done to me or anybody, reminding her over and over what she's done today and I think, so this is my purpose, this is why I'm back, the reason I'm here is to get this bitch to end herself, end her miserable fucking life and I think of my cat and how Jill never really cared for her, cared for her wine-stained furniture more than my cat and I urge her toward the scissors, I urge her toward the window and the seven-story drop, urge her toward the knives in the kitchen and she's crying, she's screaming, too bad the neighbors are all at work, they'd at least have her arrested.  And she's hardly able to walk or even stand and I think, heart attack maybe, maybe stroke and I stalk my wife and urge her to die, die until it's almost one o'clock and something begins to happen.

What's happening is that the narrator's "power" is fading, in tandem with the waning moments of Zoey's life.  Sensing his cat's death somewhere across the city, the narrator realizes the real purpose of his visitation.  Not to rescue Jill, or even torment her, but to have been there for Zoey one last time before she was carried off: "That last touch of comfort [given to her] inside the cage.  The nuzzle and purr.  Reminding us both of all those nights she'd comforted me and I her.  The fragile brush of souls."

Understanding delivers closure, both to the narrator and the narrative.  Announcing that the "last and best of me's gone now," the devoted pet owner promptly fades from consciousness.  The same cannot be said for this quietly haunting tale (based, the author shares in the appended story note, on his own experience of having to put down his housecat).  Short and bittersweet, "Returns" lingers long past its natural end point.