The day was fairly warm, but not warm enough to make me sweat. I was leaving YoungStars with my sister and we were walking home when movement flashed in my peripheral vision. I had no idea what it was, so I looked around for the movement. The trees were a good place to hide for anything that desired to stay hidden, and the grass looked pretty tall… Suddenly, the creature moved again. It pushed itself with speed across the open area with its front paws, its back paws dragging limply behind it. It was a cat.

I’m sure if you asked me immediately after that day, I would’ve been able to tell you exactly what she looked like, but my worsening memory only grants a few specific details.

I ran into the open after that cat. After all, it was a cat. I wasn’t about to let a cat slip through my grasp, even if they were wounded. So I ran after that cat with a speed that almost matched its own speed. But as soon as I was a couple of feet away, that cat hissed at me. Of course, it was a cat, and cats hiss at potential threats. But it was a cat. So I went back to Lydia, and we walked back home.

But that cat! That cat never left my mind as we played video games and watched television rentals from Family Video. So I decided something. I would get that cat, no matter how long it took. I only needed Mom’s help. That was why I waited until she arrived home.

When she arrived home, strange, wild energy took over my legs, and I ran out to meet her at her car. I explained the situation and waited for a response. But I didn’t have to wait long for a smile to appear on her face and instructions of what to get in order for it to work.

Since the cat was probably wild- she had no collar that we could see and hissed at me, and she was injured, we would use gardening gloves to get her into our pet carrier. We would also bring some cat food, water, and Temptations so that it wouldn’t be hungry. I cleaned out the carrier, and we put everything in the car. And, since I was the one that discovered her, I would be the one to put her in the carrier.

We arrived at the area, and I immediately put on my gloves as I climbed out of the car, scanning the area for the cat I had seen. Once more, I took in the fact that although there was a large open space, the trees were a capable hiding space, especially with their thick branches, and so little space in between them, save for at the bottom. I headed down the slope from the sidewalk we had parked at and skipped down into the open. I looked around the open, looking for that cat. And after a while, I checked the bottoms of the trees for that cat. And I found her under a tree to the left of my position when I had first found her, the tallest tree of that type around the area.

The branched shivered at the bottom of the tree, and the cat hissed, almost as if at the branches for giving her away. I smiled and spoke in a soothing voice, keeping in mind that this cat was hurting, and probably wouldn’t respond well anyway. Keeping the gloves on, I started to crouch down so that I could see her. We stared at each other for a while silently until I heard my Mom yell, saying something about not having all the time we wanted, even if it was summer. I started to crawl under to pull her out, and she hissed at me and backed up as well as she could. Frightened, I called my Mom over to help me pull her out.

After a lot of struggling and a hard bite, we managed to catch her with the cage. Satisfied, we went back to the car with her and sat there for a minute, figuring out what we were going to do with her now.

And we went to the nearest veterinarian clinic. We sat in the lobby, on the benches, as we waited for someone to come see us about the cat. Eventually, someone came out to see us and led us into a room to check her. They checked how she moved around, how she reacted to food and water, how she reacted to us watching her, and other such things. After a while, they pulled Mom away to talk to her.

When Mom came back, she seemed upset. And then they delivered the news.

It was highly unlikely that anyone would adopt her the way she was, and she probably wouldn’t live long either way, and it would’ve been a painful life. We would have to put her down.

I lost the details of the rest of the day, which blurred from my pain and guilt and loss. Why did something so beautiful have to die? My sister declared her name to be Stoneheart, which was quite befitting.

But before they put her down, I had a moment with her. A moment to tell her what her name was and why she had it; a moment to tell her how much I loved her, even if she would be taken away from me so early. I had a moment where she was calm and quiet, and I could watch her stare at me with those wide, citrine eyes of hers.

My mother said that even though we couldn’t talk to her, she knew, because of me, that she was loved.

I often wonder why. Why did we have to put her down? She seemed young, and healthy besides her lack of ability to use her back legs. Why did it happen? But I have a partial understanding of why, in some sort of way, it happened to her. Why the most beautiful things in life leave us too early. The flowers we pick? Those are the most beautiful.