“Helen, come out and help me catch this creature!” someone screamed at the top of their lungs.
After hearing the call, which was as loud as thunder, I closed my book and headed to the garage, where the scream came from. My eyes quickly widened at the sight of my uncle, Tom, powerfully waving a wooden stick in the space between the bottom of a row of shelves and the ground. I squatted down and realized there was a gray cat standing at a place where neither an adult’s arm nor a long stick could reach to. Immediately, I jumped back, knocking over some containers.
“What’s wrong?” Uncle Tom asked, raising one of his eye brows.
“I was bitten by a cat several years ago,” I answered, stuttering.
“Oh, you must be an ailurophobe. Go back into the house and I’ll just call my son. Don’t worry; I will make the cat go unconscious by hitting it with a stick and twisting its neck.”
“Why?” I asked loudly.
“Because I don’t have time to wait for the cat to come out voluntarily and give it away. Besides, don’t you hate cats?”
“Yes, but it is a harmless animal. You should just leave the poor cat alone. I’m sure it will eventually come out and go away by itself,” I said, doubting whether my prediction would come true.
“I wish I could, but your aunt is complaining about its feces,” Uncle Tom said.
My aunt was right. The garage was starting to smell like a trash can full of expired milk. If we were to keep the cat, there would be no one to clean up the wastes. After a moment of silence, I spoke up, “You could do whatever you want,” and walked away, taking a last glimpse at the cat. It had a short, gray cover of fur, I noticed, with two round green eyes that decorated its frightened face.
In my aunt’s family, whom I live with, the only person that I got along with was Uncle Tom, even though he was not blood-related to me. Aunty was the youngest of her siblings, but people always mistook her as the oldest because she was strict. My cousin, Jimmy, would always call me a flamingo just because my cheeks were always light pink and I was a skeleton compared to my relatives. Hence, my uncle was the only one I liked and admired, because he was the first to graduate from college in his family. But after having many images of my role model twisting a cat’s neck, I dropped my respects toward him.
On the next day, someone was kneeling down near where we found the lost gray cat.
“Uncle Tom’s probably cleaning up his victim,” I murmured.
“Helen, do you want to go with me to the supermarket?” a voice went off.
I stopped walking. “That was not Uncle Tom’s voice,” I thought. His voice should have had a calm and serious tone. On the other hand, what I heard sounded like a little kid was talking to me. Turned out, it was Jimmy. As my cousin stood up, waiting for an answer, his father came out from the kitchen, which was located right next to the garage. My uncle stared at me for a moment, then cleared his throat, and said, “Well, since I couldn’t get the cat out and kill it yesterday. I’ve decided to keep it. I’m going to buy some cat food.”
His reply struck me in the head. My body stopped functioning and froze until Jimmy threatened that I would be left alone with the cat if I kept standing there.
“I bet Uncle Tom told Jimmy about my phobia,” I said to myself, smiling brightly at them.
