Kitten Infestation

Flash Fiction Challenge 100 — Day 42

My neighbor wakes me up. I look at my phone. Damn! It’s only 7:03 AM! And it’s my only day to sleep late. Still, he’s a nice guy, and I try to stay on good terms with all my neighbors.

I lean out of my bed, rest my elbows on the windowsill.

He’s got the ladder out, leaning against his somewhat older, dilapidated house.

“You having a roof issue, Mitchell?”

He startles, looks around. Finally, his eyes find me in my open window.

He says something incomprehensible. The only word I can make out is ‘kittens.’ But that can’t be right, can it? If kittens and ladders are involved, then surely the third element should be a tree, Right?

“Did you say kittens?” I ask. I feel he probably doesn’t want to talk while on the ladder which seems to cant a scary twenty degrees to the right, but I NEED to know about the kittens.

“Yeah! Kittens. A feral cat, probably one of Jimmy’s, you know?”

Jimmy is the elderly man with cancer that lives on the corner of our tiny, ‘No Outlet’ neighborhood. He’s constantly feeding the strays! He won’t take them to get them spayed, but he’s a kindhearted soul and feeds the dozens of cats that somehow find their way to his place. It’s no wonder we have an explosion of feral cats and kittens in our tiny burg.

“The cat got knocked up. Then I guess it wanted a decent place to give birth. So she scrambled up the wall, on some of the stuff here, and entered through this hole in the soffit is my guess. Sometime yesterday, she gave birth, and then the kittens began mewling up a storm. By the time I got home, Amber nearly bit my head off. She demanded action!”

Amber, his pregnant girlfriend. My guess is they’ll marry soon. Like young people do.

His ‘some of the stuff here,’ is a kind way of putting things. There’s a wall of crap in his backyard that seems to double in height every month, is how I would put it.

Mitchell reaches his judiciously gloved arms up into the soffit, begins feeling around. The sound of mama hissing comes floats across the narrow space between our two houses. I hope his gloves are thick leather.

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