Josie’s funeral was just as she would have wanted it. Not too large of an affair, but with the whole family present. She was buried alongside her favorite toy in a small shoebox Ferrin’s father had found buried in the closet.

Ferrin sobbed and so did his mother. She really loved that cat and, as a doctor, felt a strong kinship to any living thing she couldn't save.

Lu had found Josie, shriveled up like a raisin, he said, skin clinging to her bones. Pink nose turned blue from asphyxiation. Of course Ferrin didn’t know what that word meant, he was too young, but he nodded along when Lu told him, biting his lip against his tears. He’d seen pictures of citizens who’d been caught outside at night, whether by accident or intent, their skin paper-thin and pulled too tight, like they breathed in so hard, for air that wasn’t there, that they shrunk in on themselves. His mother, the accidental source of the photographs, wouldn’t talk to him about it, using his youth as debating device. Ferrin thought 6 to be a perfect age to know everything, which is what he always would tell her, but she would just shake her head, a sad smile twitching at the corner of her lips.

His father wasn’t forthcoming either, only replying with a frown, a firm pat on his shoulder, and a stern: “That’s why we have a curfew bud.”

He wished Josie had known about the curfew, instead of running away the night before when his mother was coming home from work. He begged his father to go out looking in their car; that they could still find her, but by then it would’ve been too late. Ferrin had sat up for hours, listening for a scratch at the door, or the garage, until he finally fell into restless sleep with the weak hope that she was hiding at the Larsen’s.  A frantic call in the morning yielded no good news, so his Dad and Lu went out on a search party, once there was oxygen to breath and light to see. He stayed home with his mother and acted their Sunday routine, pretending.

They wouldn’t let Ferrin see her at first, said they had to make her pretty for the funeral. That’s when the tears broke loose. Ferrin had never known death before, had never truly understood that something one loved, something with a heart beat and a presence in his life, could cease to be. This harsh realization coupled with the knowledge he couldn’t have another pet, they were too expensive and there was a lengthy waiting list for breeders, broke his fragile young heart.

They let him officiate; say some finale

words. He mustered sweet, innocent grief like only a child can and told her they loved her through stutter-stop sobs, that cat heaven was better than life under the dome, and that there would be live grass and real mice to catch.

They laid her to rest in the hole under the false grass in a small plot in the park across the street, marking the grave with a wooden spatula. The spatula disappeared the next night, which only elicited more grief from Ferrin at the cruelty of his dead pets fleeting rest.

His first flirt with dead fueled the start of a small internal rebellion against the dome builders whose horrible design has murdered his cat. In the swift rationalization of a young and imaginative boy, Ferrin found fault in a system that most would never see, and as he aged that distrust only intensified.

From six years on he doubted in the sanctity of his government, of the authenticity of the dome and their pledge that it was all for the “safety of the citizens.” How noble could they be if they let his cat die? So in hindsight, if he had to select the one point in his life that was the catalyst for the direction his life would lead, shaping him into the man he became with the beliefs he held, it would be losing his family cat. His morbid fascination with that which delivered the death sentence upon Josie festered into a consuming need to upset the status quo and explore his world past the 9 pm mark.

She had been such a good cat.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two