My mother was a housecat.
My grandmother was a housecat.
But my great-great-great-grandmother-- she was a lion.
My mother was born and bred in captivity, but still, my mother, after giving birth to me and my four siblings, still she still she still ate the placenta.
In the wild, my ancestors did this to destroy any evidence of birth. The smell would signal to predators that there was vulnerable, fresh meat nearby, but my mother, in her suburban cage, had no predators who threatened to feast on the flesh of her kittens. Her only predators were those erect, bald, graceless humans, and they’re too cowardly to eat our flesh and so instead they devour our souls. We have nine lives, so the feast lasts forever. Cowardly. Cowardly, yet cruel.
My mother. My mother. What a cat. What a phenomenal feline.
Still wearing that pearl collar they forced around her neck, she crawled into the closet of her captors. Sweating into her fur. Bleeding onto the carpet. Quivering behind a pair of forgotten boots, my mother brought me and my siblings into this world. She roared out of primal ecstacy, and her humans, frightened by anything that reminded them of their own nature, ran to the now sacred ground. They probably looked at the bloody scene with horror, tragically blind to primordial beauty.
I imagine that in my mother’s euphoria, she smelled their fear, and her mouth watered. Her eyes dilated. Every muscle in her body became deliciously alive. She locked eyes with her captors, extended her claws and sunk her fangs into her fucking placenta. Ooooo. Ooooooo. She savored it, each bite glorious, sacred, every muscle of her jaw a dance of devotion. She stained the white fur around her mouth and her blood, our blood, divinely dripped from her whiskers.
She wildly glanced at her captors and her eyes said, “Look at me or don’t look at me: I need neither. This closet is yours but we.. me and my beloveds, beautiful and bloody, we are our own.”