My space.

I have had a long and complex history with pets, of various kinds.
Like lots of people, my first pet was a cat. Following the cat came more cats in a steady flow, at times punctuated by the arrival of the odd hawk, hamster, guinea pig, goat, sheep, chicken, fish and rabbit.

I got the incentive to write a story about my (long deceased) pets this morning whilst washing the dishes. Most of you probably dont know, but my imagination is about as dry as the crust of a pie dish. Absolutely dry.Dead. It takes me forever just to think of something to write about.
So anyway, suddenly it hits me : Write about your pets! Yea yea, I know, that topic is only used by the grade one teacher for her students "Class, tomorrow I want you to write me a nice little story about your pet at home " But hey, who cares?

So I will write about the first pet I ever had : A cat.

There comes an image in my mind of the time when I was still in grade one. I rushed into class late that day, only to find all my fellow classmates handing in their homework to the teacher; Ms. Flowers.
"what homework did we have to do? huh? hey misty, what homework?"
"we had to write about our pets at home, dont you remember?"

I looked at my teacher and back to my classmate in horror, I didn't remember at all! Frantically I whipped out a sheet of paper and spilled all of my color pencils onto my desk and scribbled a picture of a cat , you know how they used to show the kids how to draw a cat in school? a big number eight with an oversized belly and two triangles for the ears. Add in an oversized W for the mouth and a long sausage tail...yeah..
Under the picture I wrote " This is my cat snowy. I just found her last week with my cousins Bettina and Christopher. She is still not that pretty yet, but we will give her alot of milk to make her fat "

Snowy. My first pet. Not exactly mine though because my cousins and other siblings all had tabs on her. And not exactly a pet either because she lived outside and didn't let us touch her and ran away when we came too close.

I dont know where she came from only that we came across her one day whilst playing Here comes the Bride and throwing up a bunch of confetti (actually flowers ripped from the neighbours bushes) when we saw her feeding her litter of kittens. How delighted we were!! Immediately we left our game and went over to analyze her. She hissed at us but we were deaf to it. "This is our cat!" I declared " we found her first, the girl next door can't have her!!". Mention of the girl next door was absolutely necessary as we were currently at war. Just the other day to get revenge at her we had climbed up her seagrape tree when no one was looking and wrote hate messages all over the leaves hoping that she would see them the next time she climbed the tree.

From then on our play hours were devoted solely to our cat.We ran into the kitchen to get bowls of milk for her everyday, risking our mothers wrath.At times We used to get caught resulting in a sore earpulling for me and my siblings and a fearful telling off for my cousins. We worried over her at night hoping that the neighbourhood dogs wouldn't eat up her little kittens. We always made plans to sneak out at night and sleep under the cherry tree so that we would be able to protect Snowy from the dogs, but of course, that plan never worked out. We lovingly made little cardboard houses with little cut out windows and doors for her which she promptly scratched down. We used to save all of our leftovers from our meals to give to our sweet little snowy, and at times nicked some nice meaty bones from our mothers pots. And we fought over who would have the kittens when they grew big. It was a very devoted period of our little lives.

One day as I was rollerblading in the kitchen and driving my mother mad ( She kept saying "you'll burn yourself on the stove!" so many times she began to sound like a recorder) I heard my cousin Bettina give a huge scream (the girl had a monster loud voice) then she began hollering " I gonna kill ya'll dogs!!I gonna beat ya'll upppppppppppp!!!!" Before bursting into loud wails.

When my short legs finally took me to the scene I looked in horror at the remains of our cute little kitties whom we had just argued over not too long ago. Their heads were severed from the bodies and the entrails were dragged over the grass, and not far away the culprit was slyly slinking away.
"Bettina!! get that dooooogggggg!!" I howled and as one we ran over to gather the little stones which were scattered all over and began pelting that dog. Ya Allah did we pelt that dog! We were furious and we were determined to pay him back. My poor kitty!! the poor kittens!! We sure gave that dog a run for his life that day and screamed the whole neighbourhood down.

Snowy left soon after. I think she was saddened by the death of her kittens. But us being imaginative and very active children soon came across another pet of sorts.

It was a tiny little bird. We were delighted. And we determined to take care of it. We dreamed that when it grew big it would love us so much that it would walk around with us perched on our shoulders.

That night we accidentally burnt it to death.

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