"I'm sorry, Mooky, but... We can't keep you anymore."

Huh? What? Mooky stared at his owner, a tall, skinny girl with red hair; she smiled sadly as she placed him in the grass and weeds on the side of the road. Oily grass and weeds, probably infested with ants and ticks and fleas and who-knew what else that would take hours to pluck out of his fur. He stared up at her, bewildered, as she wiped tears out of her eyes and climbed back into the car.

"I'm sorry, Mooky," she said again. "Be safe, please." She shut the door. Seconds later, the car grunted back to life and pulled back out onto the highway. Mooky sat there, stunned, watching the blue van — the blue van carrying his owner — move down the stretch of asphalt before disappearing in the distance.

What just happened?

A car roared by, the snarling engine making Mooky's fur bush out. He leapt back from the highway's shoulder, tumbling ears over tail down a short slope before stopping at the bottom of a damp ditch. He scrambled back to his paws, staring up at the highway, the truth suddenly falling onto him like a heavy rain:

Had...had his owners just abandoned him?

No. It couldn't be!

Mooky clawed his way back to the top of the damp slope, panting as he again reached the road. Cars whizzed by in either direction, their roars deafening. Mooky's head swiveled back and forth, searching for the blue van, waiting for them to come back, to pick him up out of these greasy, dirty weeds, take him home.

He saw red cars, green cars, black cars, white cars. But no blue cars. No blue vans.

"H-hey!" he cried, his helpless mewl lost over the growls of passing cars. "Hey...you forgot me! Wh-where are you? Come get me! Please!"

He continued to meow in distress...but no one heard his plea. In fact, all he got was a wave of water in the face — as a car passed through a nearby puddle — for his trouble.