The cat, white, with a yellow back, ate a broken little lizard on the roof. Her paw was around the lizards head, and she had eaten half its body - the front. There was one little spot of thick blood on the white plaster patio.

A month later, the lizard's black and shrunken head was still there, boring now, but impossible to remove, eyes long since turned glazed and white now gray and shriveled like dried currants or peppercorns in a rattle. Snow came all at once, and buried it, and when it melted in spring, the head was gone also. We were a little sad to see it gone, and said so, and the cat too seemed to be suffering a loss in its own way, staring at the other roofs rather than at the cars and people below, lying in corners when there were rays of sunlight on the rugs, mewling quietly to itself at all times.