Caged Animals (Semi-Daily Flash Fiction #2)

“Alright, come on, I told you I wanted to be out of here by nine, didn’t I? I – HEY! I said be careful with that!”

Even though she’d told me beforehand that she trusted the U-Haul guys about as much as she trusted pop-up blockers, my mom was still just as smiley with them as she was with her clients. But she finally drew the line when the truck for our fragiles arrived. I was tucked into the car by then, but even with all the windows rolled up I could hear everything.

“Uccgh, just look at this! Do you idiots want to get fired!? I did not pay for amateur hour here!”

She bit their heads off like that for a while before finally throwing her hands up into the air and cancelling the extra truck so that she could pack all the remaining valuables in with us; those, along with me, my backpack, herself, her handbag, and the emergency snack stash she always had sitting on the passenger seat. And the cat, of course. She was an old girl, a dark gray tabby with even darker tiger stripes down her back, who apparently my mom had had since before I was born. She told me all the time about how she’d found her as a two-week old kitten in the bushes on her college campus, how lucky it was that she’d moved out of her anti-pest dorm into an apartment by then.

“She was my baby before I had you, dear”, she liked to say.

So she jammed everything in and then we set off. She stuffed most of it in the trunk in a Jenga stack. She stuffed everything left in with me. The whole journey I had a flat-screen pressing my legs into the seat and a bedside lamp digging into my forehead. It was early November in central Arizona, but sitting surrounded by all that stuff made it feel like June. I also couldn’t shake the image of a crumbling mountain looming in the back.

“Hey! Beep BEEP, asshole! God invented headlights for a reason! Jesus!”

I sat in the back with the cat, the cage taking up both the middle and far seat next to me. It was made of hard white plastic with small slits cut into its sides to let in the light, totally different from the types of cages I usually saw in cartoons. My mom always used this cage to take her to the vet, but she still yowled like Mom was killing her when she stuffed her in earlier, like we were going to the vet anyway. She wasn’t yowling now; aside from the occasional whining mew you never would’ve guessed she was in there.

The cage door was facing me, so I bent down and peered inside.

The cat stared at me with eyes like those of the wrongly accused. She’d bunched herself into the corner, her head lowered to hide her tucked paws. Her tail was curled so tightly around herself I almost couldn’t see it anymore. Two long strands of saliva hung from either corner of her mouth, coming together under her chin in a frothy Y-shape. I wondered how that could have happened until I remembered how much she was yowling just minutes ago. Did that happen whenever Mom took her to the vet, too? Why didn’t Mom ever say anything about it?

Mom went hard over a speed bump and the cat screamed again.

“Quiet down, baby! We’ve still got four hours to go, alright?”

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