Short Stories From My Fucked Up Life

Cats

I ran out into the yard, dusk causing the sky to grow darker as the sun slowly sank into the ground. I looked back behind me at my mom, grinning and snatching her hand from her side, yanking her foreward with all of my six year old stregnth. 

"Calm down, or I won't let you see them." she chucked, looking down into my eager face. I could hear the grass sigh as the wind pushed against it. The old barn on the other side of the driveway stood half sunk into the ground, needing a lot of fixing. Through the barn was the tall grass i would play in. The tall grass that was so tall, i couldnt see over it. The barn wasn't where we were headed, though. I pulled my mom behind me, walking past the garage doors and wood slicer that my dad would use to cut logs in half for our fireplace. I rounded the side of the house, walking down the middle of the gravel, past our garden filled with watermelons and cucumbers. At the end of the gravel was a swinging gate, swung wide open leading to the tall piles of dead trees and logs. A backhoe sat there, rusting and lonely but that didnt intrest me. It always sat there. 

I yanked my mom to the row of three small, silver bins in which we stored our logs and wood for the bacon-smelling fireplace in our livingroom. 

"Which one is it in, mom?" i asked, my small voice squeaking quietly in the silence. 

"This one." she said. Reaching for the latch to the first bin. She pulled it open and stepped over the snow guard on the bottom. She reached back for me and lifted me over it and turned to face the darkness. My eyes adjusted and I looked around in the huge space filled with wood. It smelled like sawdust and dirt. And something unfamiliar. Something warm and wet. I stepped over a fallen log and around a pile of wood, my small tennis shoes stirring dust in the dim area when they hit the ground. 

Mew!

"Mom, I hear her!" i whispered, looking around in the dark for her. My mom pointed in the corner, tucked in a nest of logs. Surrounded in logs, she laid, licking her black fur smooth. She looked up at me and meowed again. I walked closer and she watched me carefully as I looked down and spotted them. The tiny kittens, pawing at their mother's belly, sucking for milk and squirming around with their eyes tightly shut. I reached out to touch one, but my mom stopped me.

 "Don't touch them yet. Let's wait a couple of weeks and then you can." 

"Ok." I said, a little disappointed. We then turned to leave the wood bin, leaving her and her kittens alone. As soon as i exited the bin, several more cats pounced on my legs, meowing and rubbing against me. I laughed and bent down to pet them. We had almost a dozen or so cats and now new kittens. At first we had only two cats. But now there's more. I didn't know why there were more now, or where the kittens came from, but I loved them all. I skipped to the back of the house to pick lilacs while my mom made supper.