Irrecyclables.

My family used to string our recyclable plastic jugs on thirty pound fishing line that reached all the way down to the darkest and dampest depths of our basement. I can still hear Roo's shrill calls for food, or play, or attention - or just singing the hours away out of sheer, crepuscular boredom. We kept him down there on a chain because this was years before we knew anything of interspecies empathy. But he taught me the real meaning of empathy when one night he broke free from his ceiling-hung moorings and appeased his curiosity with the remnants of a recently-stringed anti-freeze jug. Painfully, over the course of two days, his innards crystallized and hardened as that poison sucked dry every drop of warm blood in his entire body. When it became too much for my mother to handle, she had me pick him up and carry him outside - an act she couldn't perform herself due to Roo's large size. His coat, which was usually surprisingly soft and thick, felt like the dry, dusty grass beneath a large, dying ant-infested pine tree. The once soft, warm hands which so many times had held grapes in curiously familiar delight had become cold and callused. When I picked him up, his weight was already spilling out on its own whims, no longer held together with the rigid attentiveness shared by all creatures when picked up and carried without consent. He was entirely limp in my arms; so distant from the cub I once fought with my sister over whose turn it was to hold and bottle-feed him; the cub that would playfully attack and wrestle with the lazy, impassive house cats. For the first time, I'd considered the life of something beyond myself. The life, and now the death. We reached the summit of the outside basement steps and saw the large, aluminum tub sitting beside Xena's house with a shared sigh of sad relief. I held him level to Xena and they touched noses and said good-bye to one another in their own universal animal way. Then Xena began to bark and test the strength of her chain, as I pulled him away. But when we reached the rim of the tub and I held him over it, almost ceremoniously, she sat still, seemed to understand. My mother - crying and kissing his masked face - then said good-bye as well. There was no resistance as I lowered him slowly into the cool water, shattering the bright noon sun laying placidly on its still surface, and let him sink to the bottom. My hand guided him all the way there, rubbing his neck until the heaving stopped.