W
hen I was a young journalist, I was exposed to many new people, places and events. I learned a lot, but my lifestyle was fast and inconsistent. Consistency didn’t enter my life until a silver-grey tabby did. I’d been covering a meeting when a friendly reporter from a rival newspaper slipped me a note just before the event adjourned. He’d heard there was a barn fire in a nearby town – severe. I thanked him as we both hurried to our cars to rush to the scene, cameras and notepads in tow. The entire building was an inferno, and men in coveralls dashed back and forth with buckets. Somehow my rivalpal had heard about this before the fire department had even arrived. I was feverishly snapping pictures when one of the men strode towards me with purpose, holding something, it seemed, close to his chest. “Can you take a kitten?” he asked. “I think the fire killed most of ‘em, but somehow this little one got away.” I’d always loved cats, but hadn’t had one since I lived with my parents. My mind raced – I had a small apartment. Money was tight. Would a kitten scratch up that new couch I finally dared to spring for? What about my plants? Would the cat decide to eat them? The man was still standing before me. He held out the kitten as though he were reading my mind and knew I needed a little extra push to convince me to take it. Maybe he thought I would change my mind if I only saw the kitten. “Please,” he said again, “I don’t have time to take care of it now, and it doesn’t have a place to go anymore.” I could only see the shape of a small creature, but I wordlessly accepted it. The kitten clung quietly to me. I felt a strange sense of warmth as I walked down the road to my car, parked a quarter of a mile from the blaze. The kitten slowly crawled up my chest until the small head butted into my chin and the curve of my neck. When I finally walked into my apartment and turned on the light, I noticed bloodstains covering my white shirt, some in obvious paw patterns and others smears. I swept up the kitten again and set it on the kitchen counter where the true condition made me gasp. The normally tough skin on the paw pads was burned off completely, leaving a bloody mess. The kitten’s fur was singed all over and its whiskers, or what was left of them, were kinked and twirled – melted as a result of the intense heat. She may have even been on fire at one point. I also noticed the kitten wasn’t just an “it”, but was a “she”. It took weeks of constant care for her Fall 2020
The Purrfect Story Tanya Sousa
paws to heal and much longer for her fur to grow out, but by the time she was a year old, Miss Kitty was luxuriously plump and shiny. No matter what happened in my life during that year or the fourteen years following, Miss Kitty, the silver-grey tabby, remained a constant and repaid me tenfold for her rescue. She moved with me three times without complaint. Because of her, each place I lived was a true home. Find Tanya Sousa’s novel, “The Starling God”, her art and photography notecards and much more at Etsy.com/ market/NatureArtsExpressed
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