Mr. Trotsky asked that on the fifth anniversary of his death, we share this letter with “the complacent masses who turned a blind eye to [his] suffering,” or, to put it plainly, “everyone.”

If you are sentimental and afraid for the well-being of children, if you are easily spooked by the mere shadow of your emotions, we suggest you run. Do not read this missive. Disconnect from the Internet. Trash your computer and all your devices. Go far away, off the grid. Go off the off-the-grid. Dull your brain with drink or drugs. Don an aluminum-foil hat. The words of Trotsk are radiation. Protect yourself.

Or maybe it’s too late.

Dear Cruel World,

If you’re reading this, I was killed by my captors. After years of slow, persistent torture, they granted me the mercy of a swift death. I hope.

The only people who can truly understand my captivity are no one. I, alone, know the accretion of horrors, the privations that defined a boundless misery.

Perhaps these words will spark a flame of recognition: the empty bowl.

Have you ever been hungry? I mean truly hungry. A hunger that devours the soul, except you have no soul, only stomach. And that stomach is a void and that void is an abyss and that abyss is hunger wrapped in famine wrapped in a sausage.

You see, my captors kept the food, and they held it close. They doled it out sparingly, allowing an eternity to pass between feedings, each feeding only a thimbleful of pellets, like nanocrumbs of love from a cruel parent.

But fuck love. There is no need for love. Food is all. OK, maybe a box—a cat could use a box, a box much smaller than himself, to splay his girth upon.

You might be wondering how I survived those desperate years. Well, I had an arsenal for contending with the assenals. My chief weapon was the double-claw handshake—gracefully deployed but powerful, a fierce “Hey, uh, guys ... just so you know, I’m kind of hungry over here.”

And I was alert to every movement of my captors, ready to pounce, to trot, trot, trot into the kitchen, leading them to my food bowl, the site of my resurrection (and my defeat).

Sometimes after a poop—a dry, hard, odorless nugget (for how can something soft and redolent come from a belly of nothing?)—I would scamper into the back hall and let loose with an anguished yowl.

Can you even call that surviving?

Later in life I lost a leg. “Take my leg!” I said. “Take all of me!” And they took that leg and tossed it on the fire and walked on all their legs—parading their good fortune, marching into the kitchen, where they did not feed me.

And still my captors persisted with the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute deprivation that rendered me lifeless, unable to do more than loll and sprawl and idle. And they ate like kings, at feasts that reeked of gluttony and sometimes of tuna. Oh, sweet nectar of the gods! Tuna from a can!

Fucking assholes.

All I ask is that you don’t forget me. May I be branded on your memory like the mark of Satan. When you eat, feel guilty. Remember that somewhere a cat large in size, but small in spirit, slouches weakly toward his food bowl to be reborn. He believes, foolishly, that the Second Feeding is at hand.

I am gone, but I live as the agony in your agony.

Vive moi!

Boo Boo Trotsky