(Oh, and sitting on things people are working on, like computers or puzzles, just to get my human-family's attention - that's fun too. Author's own image.) But I think my truly favorite time of the day is 2:30 AM; that’s when I get to hop up in bed between human-mom and human-dad. If I try really hard I can usually get them to wake up and request a rub down and maybe, if I’m lucky, a quick game of “chase the shadow” with my human-mom’s finger. Human-mom always tells me I act like a “dog in cat’s clothing,” I guess she means because I like to go on walks with my human-family and I like humans more than the average cat. Which is weird, considering my past experiences with humans. I don’t like to look back much, my human-sister has a poster in her room with a quote on it that says “Everything happens for a reason” and I believe it too; there’s no point in wasting my life complaining about the past. But sometimes, I find myself remembering how my life used to be. After all, I wasn’t always this happy…I also wasn’t always a “stray” like my human-family thinks. I was born in a house with a family living in it - my real-mom’s owners. I don’t remember much about my earliest days in that house after being born, only that my mom licked me a lot, I nursed constantly, and that it was always really cold. I don’t remember much about my real-mom either, come to think of it. I remember the way she smelled – like comfort and love and linoleum floor. And I remember the look of terror in her eyes when the yelling would start; her owner drunk and angry, throwing bottles at his wife and screaming all kinds of horrible things at her. Even at a couple of weeks old, I understood what those moods of my owner meant. My real-mom would curl up around me when the fights started because the house was too small for her to find a place to hide and because she didn’t want me or my brothers and sisters to be exposed to that violence. We were so young.
I do remember the day we left that house, because it was raining and I had never seen rain before. I would see a lot of it in the next couple of days, unfortunately. I remember getting picked up and tossed into a crate along with my other siblings and then feeling the bumps under our feet – we were in the back of a truck. Something had happened with my real-mom’s owner and his wife, something to make them not want us anymore. I was too young to understand much of what was happening but I wailed anyway along with my brothers and sisters because that’s what our real-mom was doing and we copied everything she did; we weren’t yet real cats, we were imposters, pretending we knew about life and the bad things that sometimes accompany it.
I remember the bumps under our feet stopping, remembering feeling the faux-calming purr of the engine shut off abruptly. My real-mom tensed; we were here. Wherever here was, that is. The world spun for a moment as the owner picked up our crate and lifted it out of the truck bed onto the wet side of the highway. For a moment I feared he would drop us all as he maneuvered over the embankment and into the forest several yards off of the road. Then suddenly the crate opened and a blast of cold wind hit me in the eyes. None of us wanted to leave that crate; somehow we all knew something terrible waited for us outside of it. The owner wasn’t having any of that, and I heard him curse under his breath as he began to shake the crate, forcing us to leave our temporary place of safety. One-by-one my siblings fell out of the shaking crate and I braced myself, waiting for my turn. I would be the last, followed only by my real-mom. But instead of falling out, I found my body suddenly squished between my real-mom’s and the back of the crate. She had switched places with me and then she meowed, loudly. The owner poked his head over the side of the crate and saw my real-mom. Realizing, I suppose, that my real-mom was too big to fall out of a crate, he set it down and waited for her to walk out. With one last look to me, she walked out. The owner, assuming she was the last of us, shut the crate. As I hid inside, I wailed as quietly as I could and watched my real-mom and siblings descend into the distance when the owner picked the crate up and tossed it over the back of his truck, the considerably lighter load no doubt causing the realization of what he had done to wash over him. He turned back to look at my real-mom and siblings all huddled together and crying openly now and paused for a second, then turned and stepped back into the truck.
I remained numb for the rest of the car ride. My entire life was shattered, everyone I was ever close to was gone and now I was stuck in the back of a crate with a man who did not want me or my family anymore. I began to recognize my surroundings – we were almost home. I braced myself for what would happen when he found me. Would he get angry? Yell at me like he did his wife? Take me back to my family? I knew my mom was trying to protect me by leaving me in the crate, but I figured out fairly quickly that my fate would be no brighter than my real-mom’s. Sure enough, as he unloaded the crate the owner saw me, shivering and tiny in the back of the box; helpless.
The next thing I knew, the motor hummed under my feet again, only the drive was shorter this time. This time, I was picked out of the crate by the owner’s strong, calloused hands and tossed to the side of the road.
“Don’t got nothing anymore. I can’t deal with this shit and I can’t take care of you. Sorry, kid,” came his voice wafting over my head and through my ears. I looked up at him one last time, my eyes pleading with everything I had to get him to pick me back up, take me home. I would do anything not to feel the way I felt – cold, terrified, alone.
That night the rain kept falling and the wind picked up around me. I cried and wailed for my real-mom and brothers, I desperately needed someone to keep me warm. I tried to walk to find shelter, but my leg was hurt from the tumble I took when the owner dropped me and walking was difficult. So I sat there by the side of the road, waiting for the rain to stop and waiting for someone to find me. The waiting was the worst part. Because with the waiting came the doubts. What if? What if my real-mom and brothers and sisters are hurt? What if we don’t find each other? What if the owner doesn’t come back? What if he does?
Three days I lay by the side of the road. Cars passed, don’t get me wrong, but it was a country road people were driving fast and I was so little. That’s what I told myself, anyhow. If anyone saw me lying there, nobody stopped. I began to think thoughts of death, something a child of any species should never have to dwell upon. I didn’t know about heaven or what it was then, I was too young, but I knew that there had to be something more out there for me than this. I tried to be a good boy, I never hurt anybody, so why was I sitting by the side of a wet road, my paws and face dirtied with the mud that splashed by from passing cars, my leg oozing, feeling so alone. Maybe it was like what my owner had said to his wife in one argument: “Nobody loves you.” The phrase echoed over and over again in my head and I cried some more.
On the evening of the third day, just as the sun began to set, my human-family found me. I watched as the car approached, slower than the other cars; almost as if the people inside it knew something important was waiting for them up the hill. I watched it go by me and my heart sank. Just as I lowered my head, resigned to my fate now truly, I watched the red lights on the back of the car flicker on. It was coming back! They were coming back for me! The car reversed back until it was exactly parallel to me and when the door opened a teenage girl jumped out.
“Oh my gosh, look, it’s so tiny! He’s shaking, oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” she shrieked, her hands trembling as she bent down to touch me.
As soon as I felt her hands wrap around my cold fur, I knew it. I knew I had found my human-family. The next moments and days were a blur of people and noises and places and things – all new. I was dried off and given food and petted by more people than I could count but I didn’t mind. I had never been petted before in my life, and the experience was new and thrilling. Over the next few weeks, I learned the names of my human-family members and explored the house they took me to. My leg was bandaged and I got vaccinations and a brand new red collar. I got a name, O.J., named after another cat named “Oliver” my human-family said had died a recently before they found me. 
A few days after I arrived at my new home, I overheard my human-sister, the same girl who first picked me up off of the side of the road, murmur to our human-mom, “Mom, it’s like this was meant to be. Oliver dies a few weeks ago and we magically stumble across this poor kitten on the side of the road? We were supposed to raise this little guy, it’s like it was destiny or something.” They didn’t think I understood, but I could. They didn’t know the life I had before they found me, but I did. They didn’t know that I had never felt like anything but a burden to humans until they found me. I had found happiness, I had found love, I had found compassion in the arms of a family who didn’t think twice about opening up their lives to me. And I haven’t looked back since.
Word count without picture captions: 1,926.
No comments:
Post a Comment