"Meow" by Cary Bayless

In Cary Bayless' "Meow," the narrator, Cyril, is a mentally challenged young man looking for connection. He has three friends - Earl, the owner of the Captain D's down the road, Cyril's father, and Jimmy-Cat, a stray living behind the Captain D's. The overarching conflict is Cyril's lack of understanding about social interactions and the world and manifests itself in two separate instances. The first is when Cyril breaks into Kelly's room and reads her diary - we hear Annie, another girl, talking about how she and Kelly are getting the locks changed and she shouts at him that he can't keep breaking in, implying that Cyril has broken in many times before. Later, Cyril panics when he sees Jimmy-Cat and her new litter of kittens - the blood and smell scares him enough that, without prompting, he cannot understand what he is seeing. But understanding comes when Earl gently shows him what he didn't see before.

The voice of the narrator was well written. It was easy as a reader to understand Cyril's character and sympathize with him. The detail, as well as syntax, made the mood of the narrator easy to identify without coming right out and naming the emotion. In the last conflict, when Cyril finds Jimmy-Cat, I was very impressed with the way the kittens were first described. I'm not sure that Bayless meant to do this, but when Cyril described the scene with so little detail about the "white things" that were "eating [Jimmy-Cat's] stomach," I, as a reader, was confused and disgusted as well. My first thought was that the cat had died and was covered in maggots - something I can understand; Cyril has no idea what he is seeing, making it just as upsetting.

I think that the story could be enhanced if Cyril's father made an appearance. The reader hears through the characters that the man is important, but he never shows up at any point. Kelly never appears either. Another part of the story that seemed a bit off to me was the two very separate conflicts. The conflict with Annie and the diary does not tie in with the rest of the story, or the title, yet it opens the story and takes up half of the text. I think that incident can be cut down and the scene with Jimmy-Cat can be extended.