Brief Life by Kevin Marc Fournier

Author:Kevin Marc Fournier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781773370828
Publisher: Great Plains Publications
Published: 2022-09-09T17:17:36+00:00

17

A birthday present;

a bit of jealousy

For Tracy’s eighth birthday, her father bought her a kitten: calico, with a splotch of black fur across her eyes that gave her the look of a bastard half-raccoon. He had smuggled her home from the Brandon humane society in complete secrecy and hid her overnight in his greenhouse, braving the very real fear that she would wreak havoc with his plants. Luckily, she was too frightened and confused to do anything but hide.

His plan had been to get up early and slip the kitten into Tracy’s bedroom as she slept, so that she would wake on the morning of her birthday to the sight of her new pet, perhaps curled up at the foot of her bed, or perhaps even sniffing with shy curiosity at her face. He had vividly imagined his reward: sitting at the kitchen table, drinking his morning coffee, and listening to his daughter’s delighted squeals of discovery, and the thunder of her excited feet as she rushed downstairs to tell everyone. But when morning came, he was unable to find the stupid animal anywhere. She had hidden herself so effectively inside the greenhouse that he was forced at last to wake both his daughters and ask their help to hunt, having first removed his bottles of scotch from their stashes and hid them temporarily behind the seat in his pickup truck, wrapped in an old wool blanket.

It took nearly an hour of careful searching for the girls to discover the kitten at last, filthy and terrified: she had crawled into an almost empty bag of potting soil in the back corner, beneath a table of cattleya, behind a stack of empty clay pots. It took another half an hour almost to coax her out, Tracy having received a ragged nasty scratch on her wrist when she had first reached into the bag recklessly to grab her. Her grandmother put iodine and a band-aid on the scratch, and Tracy named the kitten Pudge.

Once inside the house, Pudge went into hiding again and wasn’t seen for two whole days. It was Nora who finally found her for the second time, hidden in the furnace room: actually inside the ceiling, having gotten into the rafters where several tiles had long ago fallen down. It was Nora who was able at last to coax her out, and got her to eat, and Nora alone whom she would allow, at first, to hold her and stroke her fur. It took a good month before the poor thing was comfortable enough not to startle and flee at any unexpected sound, and another month after that before she felt confident and secure enough to become playful and affectionate, like a real pet. The day she knocked a saucer off the end table where the girls’ grandmother had placed a newly pulled incisor, still wet and bloody at the root, and batted and pounced the tooth around the room as if it were a mouse, was celebrated as a kind of milestone.

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