@ridevendor
Shion sat on the edge of his bed and watched the tiny grey kitten growling and pawing at the crack under his closed bedroom door.
He had brought it in when he found it yowling plaintively outside the front door, looking scruffy and malnourished. It couldn’t have been older than eight, maybe ten weeks - it was hard to tell when it was so skinny and covered in tangled fur.
Over the last couple of days he had fed, nursed, and groomed it as best he could without proper pet care equipment. It had reminded him pleasantly of the days he had spent caring for that gaggle of dogs back in West Block.
It wasn’t until the kitten was steady enough on its feet to start exploring that the trouble started. The plant in his study had been acting up ever since he’d put up the Halloween decorations (and yet, try as he might, he could not muster the willpower to take them down), but when it met the kitten, things really went to hell.
The kitten had poked its nose at the shoot curiously before leaping back in alarm, hissing and standing its wiry fur up on end until it looked like a ball of steel wool with eyes and teeth. The strange part, though, came when the plant itself did something similar; leaned up out of the soil it was planted in and wiggled its leaves menacingly. Shion didn’t think a plant had the necessary appendages to leer menacingly at a small frightened animal, but it was the only description for what he was looking at that made sense.
Since then, the kitten had stayed shut in the bedroom (it was not a fan of this, one bit) while Shion fretted about what to do. He felt nervous and edgy, more nervous and for less reason than ever before in his life, pacing his small abode and fiddling with his glasses (how long had he been wearing glasses for, again?) while the plant insinuated all kind of horrifying notions about what could be done with the kitten, if only he had the guts to do it.
Eventually, less out of resolve and more out of a lack of any better idea, he had boarded the train and wandered about the city’s various sectors in a panicked frenzy, stapling handmade signs to any post he could find that would accommodate them.
The signs read “FREE TO A GOOD HOME” in shaky lettering at the top, followed by a blurry phone photo of the kitten and a few more scribbled doodles of it in black marker, making a face that Shion hoped communicated “plaintive affection”. At the bottom was his phone number and the words “PLEASE CALL”, underlined. And underlined again. And a couple more times for good measure.
When the haphazard stack of papers under his arm had dwindled to nothing, he made his way back home. He sat at the edge of the bed. He watched the kitten box with the door, nervously looking out for any creeping plant matter under the crack. He waited for the phone to ring.
