By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2022 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
__________Ember was a flame-tipped, white-coated Turkish Angora. Her fierce, green eyes stalked a brown rat. The rat slid out from the drainpipe of one of the oldest houses in the city. Ember watched as the rat shook itself, and as it scurried up the side of a metal wastebin, which the residents of the house left one drawstring bag too full. The lid of the wastebin sat atop the extra bag. The residents of the house hoped the presence of the lid would appease the sanitation services provider and prevent an additional bag fee from appearing on their monthly bill. Regardless, the loose lid failed to dissuade pests from raiding the wastebin. Ember eyed the brown rat hungrily, as she watched it settle its nerves, and chew a thimble-sized hole in the extra bag. Once the rat settled on a prize, it no longer twitched its head from one interrupting sound to the next. Ember curled her lips and narrowed her eyes.
__________The rat sniffed for a loose peanut. Before it stole its prize, Ember ducked her head, pressed her paws against the sidewalk, and pounced. Ember’s rear legs smacked into the side of the wastebin as she landed, knocked it over, spilled its contents, and launched her prey a few inches above her front paws. The lid of the wastebin flew like a frisbee, hit the brick wall of the building across from the old house, and fell upon the sidewalk with a series of clangs.
__________Ember snapped at the rat, but it bounced off her nose. The rat bolted, but she pursued it. She caught it once, twice, and then thrice. She batted it between her paws, let it escape a few inches ahead, and then retrieved it. She hoped to give the small, frightened rodent a heart attack, and eat it only after it was dead.
__________After a few minutes of Ember’s conniving, the rat nearly escaped into a nook too small for Ember’s nose to fit through. She bit the rodent’s fleeing tail at the tip and dragged the rat’s body from the hole. She lifted her head, tossed the rat into the air, caught it as it fell, and chomped it.
__________She licked her lips as she swallowed. Your fault for not dying sooner, she thought.
__________Ember flicked the tip of her tail, lifted her nose into the air, and tramped into the sunlight beyond the alleyway. A few blocks down the road, she stopped before an intersection, and plopped down on her rump. Then she lifted her paw to her tongue and groomed herself.
__________A little girl pulled away from her mother’s hand and snuck behind Ember. She wrapped her arms around Ember’s belly and lifted her. Ember hissed, rolled, and scratched her way free. The little girl screamed. Ember bolted across the street. She did not see the orange cones that surrounded an open grate.
__________Embers paws met air and then sludge. She fell into a basin of sewage, surrounded by workmen in white, rubber suits. As she struggled to swim ashore in the thick muck, one of the workmen grabbed her by the scruff.
__________She curled and stiffened, as if petrified. Curse nature’s stilling grip! she thought. This weakness is for kittens, not cats! For mother’s teeth, not a stranger’s fingers!
__________Ember’s captor chuckled. “Not so wild now, are you?” he joked.
__________Ember glared.
__________Her captor addressed the others in his crew. “Someone radio animal control,” he suggested. “Tell them we’ve got a live one!”
__________One of the rubber-clad workmen nodded. He climbed up a ladder and surfaced from the sewers. He freed one of his hands from its glove, lifted a radio to his ear, and called for aid. An animal control officer arrived shortly after, alongside a liaison from the Humane Society.
__________The officer tossed Ember into a plastic carrier. He shut and locked the carrier door in Ember’s face. Ember clawed at the bars and growled. The officer loaded her into his truck. He drove Ember and the shelter worker to the city shelter. The shelter worker took packaged Ember inside, cleaned, and assessed her.
__________Soaked and scared, Ember’s will abated. The rat and I have changed places, she bemoaned. Now I am the one jostled between greedy paws.
__________Too worn to lash out at those who handled her, Ember passed the shelter’s behavioral assessment. She was granted a clean bill of health. The shelter worker, who brought Ember in, stashed Ember in a cubicle. A plastic window exposed Ember to the many eyes of the apex predators who had defeated her. She reviled them.
__________Whenever one of them pressed his face and hands against Ember’s window, Ember narrowed her eyes just enough to frighten him, and send him on to another cubicle. She lived on as she was, until her whiskers greyed.
Endlesslore 