Read the Prologue: here Wordcount: 431 Part: 4/ongoing
The Cub
It had been too cold to leave the window open last night, but I still didn’t shut it. The chill awakened me before my alarm and I lay quiet and still for a while, staring at the pale sky. I sighed and pushed my comforter back, stretching and combing my hands through my tangled hair. I liked to give myself an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for school in the morning. Well, at least in September, I did.
I brewed a cup of chai and mellowed it with milk. The creamy white clouds roiled up in the amber darkness and swirled to fill my cup with the soft color of autumn. For a while I sat and stared out the steamy kitchen window watching black squirrels race up and down the trees in the backyard.
This would be the year I became an all-A’s student, I told myself. I told myself that every year, but a couple of B’s always found their way in. Did it really matter? School? I don’t know. But maybe I had better pretend it does for one more year.
I finished my tea, washed my face, combed my hair, put on the outfit I had laid out the night before. And when I went back out into the living-room, a little tiger kitten was sitting on the outside windowsill looking in.
It was gray and white with soft downy fur that caught the early morning light in a halo around its little figure. The eyes were still dark and blueish, not yellow yet. When I opened the window, it came right in.
“Do you think we can keep it?” I asked Mom after we fed it some scrambled eggs and before I went out to catch the bus.
“We’ll see if anyone else knows where it came from, but I doubt your Dad cares. It could be nice to have a cat.”
She was still at the house when I got back from school that afternoon, and she followed me inside as if it was our little habit to come home at the same time. We called her Tigerlily, and every time she heard her name, her soft oversized ears lifted, and her eyes grew round. It was like someone had called her that before. I’m convinced it’s not the only word she understands.
Strange thing about the kitten: No one we asked had ever seen her before, and there aren’t many strays or drop-offs in our neighborhood. She was too young to have traveled far by herself.
Maybe she fell from the sky.