Page 9 of Inflict

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?

Even though Connor knew the cat and kittens weren’t his to keep, he worried about them, and how they would fare once the snow started to fall in a couple of months. He knew the mother cat hunted for food, because sometimes he found the heads or guts of tiny mice just outside of the hole, and he once saw the orange tabby carrying a mouse into her den.

Come winter, he knew the rodents would den, too.

How would she eat then?

Would the babies still be drinking her milk?

He didn’t know much about animals, but he didn’t think any of the answers to his questions would be ones he liked. He also knew that asking his father to bring the cats inside for the winter would do him no good, except to watch Sean kill the animals, so he didn’t bother to even try and convince himself to ask at all.

Instead, Connor had gotten another idea.

One day, while walking the trails in the woods, he’d found a bird that was almost dead. Not quite dead, as it still moved, but almost. He wasn’t sure if it had fallen from up high in a tree, or if it had gotten hurt some other way and fallen to the ground. Maybe it was old, and was just dying as things did when they got older.

He wasn’t sure, but he’d crushed the bird’s head under the heel of his shoes, made sure it wasn’t moving after that, and took it to the den where he knew the cats still lived. He left the carcass just outside of the hole, and when he checked the next morning, the tiny, dead bird was gone.

He’d done the same thing for a mouse he’d found in the cellar of his house, although that had been trickier, because the mouse was very much alive and quite fast. But he got it—his pocketknife did the rest of the work for him. That time, the mouse he left behind disappeared, too.

Connor felt good.

He was helping.

He still worried that the cats would be too cold in the winter.

For that, he didn’t know how to help at all.

Peering into the hole, Connor found all three kittens tangled into one sleeping pile of fur. The mother cat wasn’t in the den with them, but he didn’t think that was very unusual, as she often left the kittens alone. He had also learned, over the past month, that cats slept a lot. Mostly, they came out of their den toward nightfall, when it was dusk, and there was less activity.

Sticking his hand in the hole, Connor let his fingertips drift over the fur of his favorite of the three kittens. The multi-colored one—he thought it was a male, probably, and though he knew better, he’d given him a name: Kitty.

It wasn’t very original, but Kitty was the only one of the three kittens that let Connor pick him up and pet him, or sometimes he would even sit in his lap and let him talk for as long as he wanted.

If he could pick just one of the cats to keep, it would be Kitty.

“Connor!”