Inflict: A Novel

Chapter Two

One Year Later ...

The soft meowing coming from behind the old shed had Connor picking up his pace as he rounded the back side of the building. His father always said to stay away from the shed, because it leaned too much to the left, and a strong wind would blow it over. Sean never used the shed, and just a peek inside the one broken window told Connor it was empty and dirty.

Connor didn't have much use for the shed, either, but one day, a month earlier, he had heard the strange cries coming from behind the building while he had been carving his name into a tree with his pocketknife. He followed the sounds, both intrigued and scared, until he found what exactly it was that had been making the noise.

A cat.

A tabby, orange-colored, with stripes all up its back and blood on its back legs. She had just been slipping into the large dug out hole that led underneath the shed, when Connor caught sight of her. Unsure of what to do, he'd raced back to the house, sneaked out the flashlight his father kept under the sink, and went back to the hole.

He kept watch while the cat birthed three kittens, hidden in her safe spot. The whole time, she watched Connor, too, probably trying to figure out what in the hell he was doing there. He decided she was a stray, since she was kind of dirty, and she had no collar.

Connor didn't know much about cats, or what to do when he saw the animal's kittens come from her body, all wet and slimy in wee sacks. His curiosity kept him there, long enough for him to watch each kitten come out, for the mother to eat the sacks and other bits that came out with the kittens, and then for her to clean each furry bean shape until near soundless meows filled the hole under the shed.

He was amazed.

He was also careful not to touch the kittens, or the mother cat, if only because he didn't want to scare her away, or hurt her babies. They were very wee—enough to fit into his six-year-old hand.

His father hated animals. All kinds, not just cats. Connor had once seen Sean kill a neighbor's cat just for walking across the hood of his car, and he knew his father left raw meat with poison pellets outside around their property whenever other neighborhood animals came around too much.

Connor wasn't allowed to have pets.

He knew better than to even ask.

It was that reason alone that he kept quiet about the mother cat and her three baby kittens hidden behind the shed in the hole under the building. He figured it wasn't the orange cat's fault that she had wandered onto their property to have her kittens, so he didn't say a thing, instead checking on them once or twice a day when he knew he wouldn't be caught.

Now that a month had gone by since he first found the mother cat giving birth, the babies were not wee furry beans that couldn't make very much noise or move very far. The kittens, one black and white, one colored like its mother, and the third—his favorite of them all—a multi-colored kitten, were capable of crawling from the hole and wandering into the tree line just behind the shed where they played and fought.

They didn't wander very much farther than that, though.

Sometimes, if he went to visit the cats, and the mother wasn't there, he'd find the babies meowing, and it made him sad. They didn't have a home like he did—even if his wasn't a very good home—and he wondered if they were cold or hungry. It was fall, the leaves had just begun to turn color and the air was chillier, so he wondered what the cats would do once winter came.

How would they get food?

How would they get warm?

Would their mother leave because they were bigger?