Revised: Cats

“It’s a shame,” says the woman who smells like too many cats, shaking her head at the kittens in the wire cage. “A real shame.”

She’s older, would be a housewife if she wasn’t working at the shelter every day. She would also probably have too many cats, too, because she’s just the kind of woman to find a kitten in the back yard and feed it until was too big to suit her tastes, no longer tiny and adorable, and it would just never leave, just like the twelve cats before it.

I sort of hum in agreement to her observation and dump the cat litter in the trash bin that never actually leaves the room, making the cat kennels perpetually smell like baking powder with an underlying hint of shit.  I lean back as the litter hits the bottom, but I can never avoid the belch of pure eau-de-cat that follows. It’s not enough of a deterrent to keep me from doing my job, but it’s enough that the shame of this particular litter of kittens is almost completely lost on me.

“A real shame,” she says again, looking at the kittens’ papers. “Abandoned on the side of the road, barely even weaned. Not even old enough to fix, yet. A real shame.”

I give a glance around at all of the other cats in the shelter, older but still good, still loving, and that is a shame. Some have been here for weeks, like Lily. She’s the definition of sweet, but she has traits people don’t want – black fur and a missing eye, surrounded by pink scars. She is only two years old and housetrained, but she was given up by owners thirteen days ago, and no one has wanted her, since.

I peek around Cat Lady’s shoulder to see the kittens she’s so emotional over. I’m not moved to tears, but I have to admit that there’s something pitiful about the little animals. They’re still exploring the metal boundaries of their hopefully temporary home with as much curiosity and wonder as they are capable of. One of them bats at a string hung from the top of the cage, and it’s cheap, but for them it’s like every hunting instinct they didn’t know they had has come bursting to fruition. The smallest, white kitten mewls with victory around a tiny cough.

All six kittens have upper respiratory infections, so they’re semi-confined in the back corner of kennel. For me, that’s the real shame – all the little black and white and tortoise shell kittens hidden away, coughing and mewling quietly for attention where no one would hear them.

Cat Lady shakes her head and starts making another circle around the room, and I replace the litter box I emptied into its kennel. I juggle the cat and the box for a moment as she takes the open grate as an invitation to leave, but they both end up in the cage in the end. I glance at the clipboard hanging from the corner of the gate, making sure she’s not still on any medications.

When she came to us, two weeks ago, Lily had been terrified, cowering, clearly overwhelmed by new smells and sounds. She’d padded around her new kennel with her ears low, sniffing here and there and ultimately curling up in the darkest corner she could find, face turned away from the iridescent lights.

“She’s a great cat,” the man of her old family had said. “She’s so gentle; she hasn’t a mean bone in her body. Best friends with the family dog, great with children. But she and our son don’t get along like we hoped.” Their eyes went to the scars around her empty eye socket, and then darted away. “I’m sure she’ll find a nice home,” he said. “She really is too sweet.”

Lily purrs and rubs her body against the bars in greeting, and I scratch along her back as she goes. I’ve volunteered at this shelter for two years, working for volunteer hours and scholarship credit, and of all the cats that have come and gone I’ve never seen one more friendly and trusting than her. Every day, people pass by her cage and read her bio, and every day she purrs and meows and dangles, docile, as arms unaccustomed to holding an animal cradle her close while the humans discuss if she’s worth her ruined eye. And every day, she’s put back in her crate and left behind, crying.

The door across the room opens, sending the out-of-season jingle bells that hang from the knob clanging as they slap against the wood. A man walks in, jeans and a sport-coat like he’s come straight from church, nose crinkling as he holds the door for his blonde, properly pressed wife and their pudgy, eight year old daughter. They all stay there a moment, lingering in the doorway and looking around the ten by twelve by ten room with metal cages lining the walls and living things meowing and yowling for their eyes until the little girl asks what they’re all thinking: “What’s that smell?”

Cat Lady shuffles over to help them choose a cat. I ignore the whole conversation as she begins asking the “important” questions: Do you have other pets? How much time do you spend at home? Do you want a boy or a girl cat?

These people don’t want a cat at all.

There’s always hair everywhere, so I gather up the broom and dust pan and start sweeping. Clumps of fur roll and drift in front of the broom’s strokes like cicada husks, and I look up to see the wife’s lip curl into a slight grimace. She glances at the floor at her feet and tries to make it look like she’s not nudging fur away from her little square of linoleum. Cat Lady doesn’t notice, and gestures to a playful black and white cat called Panda. The little girl starts to push her grubby fingers through the bars, and I lean on the broom to see what Panda will do. Whatever he’s thinking as he watches the wiggling little sausages, he doesn’t get a chance to act on it. The wife swiftly shakes her head and shuffles her daughter forward like a battering ram to get past the black fur and mess to what will hopefully be a cleaner spot.

There is no cleaner spot, but she’s welcome to shuffle her daughter the entire circumference of the room until she makes it back to the door and out Kitty City forever. The little girl keeps slowing her down and shoving her fingers into each cage, though, until one cat makes a swipe at her finger and her mother pulls her away from the crates with a gasp of outrage. They pause briefly at Lily’s cage, the woman not paying much attention as her daughter pokes at the cat’s paws without even looking at her face. Then they’re moving away again and Lily lies against the grate, welcoming more petting if it will come.

 The man follows behind his wife at a more sedate pace, pretending to look at each cat and give a cursory glance at each Kitty Cat Bio printed at the top of each sheet clipped to the kennels. He pauses at Lily, for a moment, looking closely at her papers.

“Honey,” he says, “how about this one? Short hair, house trained, great with kids. She sounds… oh.”

“What?” The woman is trying, unsuccessfully, to dislodge a clump of hair from the toe of her shoe without bending down.

“Never mind. She’s only got one eye.”

“Ew! I wanna see!”

The daughter tries to rush over, eager to gawk at the one-eyed freak cat, but her father catches her by the hand and drags her to the door. Eventually they’re all gone and Lily is pawing at the spot where the man had been standing, mewling.

“That’s a shame,” Cat Lady says, hands on her hips as she shakes her head. “They would have made a great home.”

No, they wouldn’t, I want to say to her. They would have hated a cat. The man with his wrinkled nose and the woman with her fear of hair and the little girl with no respect for claws or lost eyes would have hated any cat, even one as perfect for a family as Lily.

By the time I sweep my way around the room, the dust bin is full and there’s more hair on the floor where I started. One of the cats has knocked its food dish over, too, and the kibble crunches under my feet. I sweep that up, too, and call the task done. A cursory glance around the room makes me smile. Cat Lady has finally stepped out for her afternoon smoke and left me to brush the cats.

It’s a long task, brushing each cat – head to tail, they’re nothing but loose fur and over-friendly claws – but most of them know the drill and are just content to drape themselves over my arm and shoulder. I take Lily from her cage and sit on the only stool in the room, brushing her short fur slowly, gently. Lily settles down and her chest starts thrumming. This is what those people wanted: a purring lap animal. Except there’s still so much hair everywhere that I’m sure the wife would have had a conniption no matter how much she wanted to add an iconic purr to her pretty, pressed home.

The door opens, again, and Lily makes to jump from my arms, so I carefully aim her back at her cage and close the gate behind her. There’s a boy standing there looking lost and more than a little nervous, a crumpled wad of cash in his hand. He can’t be older than fourteen.

“Are you looking for a cat?”

His eyes dart to the left. “Yeah.”

“Do you have any other pets or small children?”

“I… yeah, we have a dog. And I have a little sister,” he says. He fidgets as I start moving around the kennels, checking the pages of each cat. “She’s six. That’s why we’re getting another cat, actually. We had one. Her name was Fluffy. My other sister named her when she was little, before I was born, and she died last month. Fluffy, not my sister. Our dog’s been moping ever since, and she sometimes doesn’t eat anymore –”

“Mmhm,” I say, and it’s Lily’s papers that I stop at. Her owners apparently had small children and two dogs, and the cat had no problems. “Are you okay with a girl cat?”

The boy sidles up to me, looking into Lily’s cage. He smiles. “Yeah. This one looks perfect.”

Lily meows adorably, right on cue, and I can’t keep from chuckling at the way the boy pokes his finger between the bars to scratch her ear. She purrs and walks along the grate, ears and tail flicking, happy to just be-

There’s a flash of black and white, and the boy shouts, snapping his hand back. There’s blood dripping down from two long cuts on the back of his hand. Lily is snarling and hissing, her one eye locked on the boy’s face hackles raised, legs stiff. I take a step back, pull him along as well. She’s never done anything like this before.

“We should wash this,” I say, and my voice is shaking. I lead him to the back sink and clean and bandage him up. He fidgets nervously then notices the kittens in the corner. They cough and mew at him as he stands over them. I tell him none of them will be ready to take home for a few more days. He says he’ll ask his mom if they can come back for the big tortoise shell.

Without another glance at Lily, or any other animals, he leaves.