Still life in the Canal de l'Ourcq

One man's trash, another woman's treasure

Sarah Rose, Cat in a bag, Canal de l’Ourcq

I’ve seen many dead animals in the Canal de l’Ourcq
a swan, pigeons, rats…
now I’ve seen two ginger cats.

The Canal has this odd effect where
carcasses hardly decompose,
they’re somewhere in between life and death,
seemingly mid-stride, immaculately preserved
like animals in Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde

only these carcasses are animated,
slowly drifting, flying, floating,
slightly obscured by the soupy green water.

In all cases, it felt like sacrilege to take a photo.
But in this case, as I stood aghast, staring at this figure,
everyone around me huffed and puffed and went on their merry way
other merrymakers cackled in their springtime rental boats.
No one stopped to see what I was looking at —
because the cat and I were both invisible.

A photo is my only testament
of this nanosecond
in an alternate universe.

This image is both tragic, comic, and beautiful.
It’s very rare to hit all of those notes at once.
How does a cat drown with a small bag of crisps on its head?

It doesn’t.

My mind drifted to the human addiction to processed food:
the purchase of a snack-sized bags of crisps.
I imagined the cat’s temperament and
the human who suffocated it and threw it in the water.

One would think that the tide, gravity, or some other force of nature
would separate the cat and the bag…

But the canal has this magical effect
of embracing the dead,
suspending them in time
exactly as they were
and whatever they hoped to be.