I spent the day dusting and scrubbing floors then Henry came back from visiting his parents. I forgot all about my cat, having let her out for whole days since I acquired her from someone wanting to unload the last of her cat’s litter. That was ten years ago and after tons of false alarms when I patrolled the many neighborhoods I lived in only to find her up a tree or atop someone’s tool shed I figured she knew enough to stay out of the road.

I scooped her up and ran upstairs. I put her down and tweaked her leg and it just hung there with her paw curled beneath her. She just glared at me, telling me that professional care was required at once, the expensive sort. Honey was debiting my bank account with her eyes. After grabbing a novel for the waiting room, I packed her into her pet taxi and we were off. It had to be serious, since she was too upset to stick her paws out of the holes in the door to her carrier.

We were at the clinic for a good two hours. I spent a king’s ransom on x-rays alone. Her leg was broken, just as I feared. The x-rays revealed that she had been shot with a pellet gun, once in her right shoulder and once in her abdomen. I stood there in the examination room, staring at the ghostly image of Honey’s skeleton on the wall. “Someone shot my cat?” I whispered. The doctor nodded and said that this was happening all the time. He went on to say that both pellets exited, and the stomach wound was minor as that pellet just grazed the fat pad. Some metal fragments were visible in the shoulder area, but luckily her internal organs were spared. The doctor assured me that Honey would live, but that she might lose the leg. They don’t do fracture repairs at the emergency clinic, so I would have to take her to a regular vet on Monday.

I drove her back home in a daze and spent the weekend touching her paw at the end of her pink-bandaged leg, making her flex her claws. I saw a marathon of America’s Next Top Model and cried along whenever another girl was cut from the herd. Then someone would call and get the bad news. “Do you want to watch obscure films and eat some Baklava?” “Oh, no thank you. I’d rather watch girls bawl in front of hard-faced judges and try to stimulate Honey’s leg.” It was a weekend to remember.

I found a vet that told me he could save her leg, and learned how to squirt medicine into my cat’s mouth twice daily. Henry moved out, I had known since Memorial Day that it was only a matter of time and circumstance. I painted the apartment, and took Honey to the vet at insane hours of the morning. This whole experience shot a sliver of pissed-off into my demeanor. I work in customer service for a prominent satellite T.V. company and sometimes while trying to explain billing to someone with a passel of brats squalling in the background, I wanted to throw my headset across the room. Luckily, I get free T.V. service as one of my perks so when I was too poor to go out I still had syndicated cartoons to watch.

Today, it’s like it never happened. She had to wear a pin in her shoulder for two months, but Honey has regained full use of her leg. She hates loud noises even more than she used to, but I can live with that. Usually, I don’t even think of how I once dropped a thousand dollars to have her put back together. I still daydream of finding the culprit, just so I could send him, or her, a picture of Honey with a note saying something like: “You missed!”