1/24 - Cat of Serial Killers
My owners are very odd people.
I had always been worried that this would be the case one day, when I was still a kitten with my mother in the cages of the shelter I spent most of my life in.
My mother said that humans were by nature odd and that we should love them for it. But then she would say things like “our people were so very odd dear…” whenever I asked why we had been stuffed in a box and shoved from one place to another until it opened up here.
Those were my first memories: the box, the darkness, the sounds of pain my mother made, and the first cries of my siblings.
All of them are gone now. There had been eight of us, if my mother can remember correctly. Two of them had been taken away right when the people here opened our box up and never returned, the other five had been picked out by hands of all types and taken away too.
Little hands, soft hands, hands with nails of every color I have ever seen, large hands, hands covered in fur, hands that felt rough but were gentle.
Hands scooped up five of my other siblings, and they never got brought back.
Mother says that they found a new home, when I asked if that was the first two, then she never answered.
I was there for a long time, long enough that one day, after my mother had been sleeping for very long, she was picked up and taken out the same door my other two siblings were, and I never saw her again. I spent a long time there by myself, always worried that I would end up with odd people like the ones my mother had.
Now, though, I think it's fine. Two humans, one man and one woman, both seem fairly young adults, surely, but not old like the ones with wrinkled skin and white fur atop their heads that I saw pass by at the shelter. I get fed new food every week, they chase the toy with me every day, and we get to do this thing where they pretend they don't like it when I sit on their warm glowing things, and I stick my paw in their cups. They have a little house on a quiet road, no kids or other creatures to disturb my place on the couch.
Or at least there hadn't been when I first arrived over five years ago.
But then the odd thing happened.
My owners came home with a man, all three of them stumbling around, but only he smelled like the sour stuff in the cabinet bottles. They were laughing and crying and cheering about something on my couch, when all of a sudden there was screaming and shouting, and the three of them were tumbling around and scratching at each other like two streetcats fighting over trash.
Then the one man stopped moving.
He was gone the next morning. He was dragged into the bathroom, and I never saw him come out. The next few weeks were odd, in a bad way, like what I'm sure my mother’s owners were like before we ended up in the box. The man got sad, started crying all the time, and the woman got angry, shouting and hitting things.
They would both curl up around me and cry or scream into my fur.
Then they took me to the shelter again, holding me up to different crates as we walked by.
“Pick which one!” The woman told me.
And one of the older cats there pointed at a new kitten, “last one of her litter, came in with five others and no mother,” he whispered at me, nodding as I looked over towards the tiny shaking thing.
So I picked her, and we came home, and now I share my couch.
And every so often, the same thing happens. They bring someone in, they enter the bathroom and never leave, the man gets mad, and the woman gets angry, and then we all go back to the shelter.
There are sixteen of us here now: eight cats, three lizards, two fish, two dogs, and a bird.
And we all agree, our owners are very odd.
