New Writing by Jen Craig

The inheritance


My colleague took great delight in hearing that one of the students we
taught together, a student who appalled her by continual racist slurs on her
fellow students and, last month, on Barack Obama¹s biological legitimacy,
had recently inherited an aged, diseased cat. Having spent years looking
after an irascible and childless neighbour, I had heard, looking after in
the sense of occasionally ringing the elderly neighbour¹s doorbell and
bringing her soup or the local paper, our student had been furious to learn,
after the neighbour¹s death, that the stately but disintegrating terrace
house in Stanmore she had coveted had been left to the church instead of to
her.

The delight of my colleague would have been complete if I had been able to
tell her about months of exorbitant vet bills and feline dyspepsia, but this
student, always canny and now grown righteous in her anger, told me that she
had left the cat at the church in a laundry basket. The church would
understand, was all she had said.