Astray
Neglected children are often drawn to animal rescue, observes a social worker. To strays needing reliable food, and a home, a place to sleep safely. Abandoned cats, betrayed, waiting for their owners who have walked out on them, never to return. Hungry, and hungrier. No way to fend for themselves, and how could they? Even the adult ones live two, tops three years on their own at best. And the kittens die of cold, so easily. Those bodies, conceived and borne but too small to withstand the world’s cold nights. They look like dark pink rats, so bare, so hairless. Huddling in a stucco corner. Residual heat of an engine, turned off only for the night. No one asked them to be born but here they are. If they survive the night they learn how to ask. Bodies so small they are only barely cats, tiny spike tails, cries like birds, ears that flutter in wordless pleasure and relief when the cats finally suckle. Somehow they learn how to ask or they cannot survive. (Neglected children often speak early too.) Eating the wrong food because wrong is better than none, any is better than none. Unless someone saves them, they are mothers at six months, vessels sucked dry, bundles scraped out, the kittens quickly as big as their mother, nursing her to death when there is no more food. Some of us cannot let be done to cats what was done to us. That stab in the belly, that griping guilt nearly shame, that recognition of cruelty and selfishness in the place of love, bringing that faint sob if you can dare to accuse, that swallowed sob before words that says, Quick, make this right, before, because, it is happening to you.