Response: September

I'm interested in seeing what makes this story a personal narrative, about what this means to her. It's clear that she's drawing some connection with the small animal and herself and her own experiences, but it's left open and ambiguous. Perhaps the purpose of that is so that we can relate it to ourselves and feel a sense of connection with her, because we feel like we understand what she was going through, when in reality, we don't know.

To me, it speaks to a sort of sadness, to a willingness to be that cat and just sink back into the earth so that we don't have to feel anymore. It's quite a bit of emotion packed into just one paragraph, into a lot of what seems to be non-emotional sentences like "I learned it takes only days for a small animal's body to decompose at this time of year..." which is very try. It just states the facts. But when you put it together, there is a lot of imagery there, "To press its outline back into the soft earth..." and it is full of double meaning and hidden motives.