Bayonetta

garnetfenghuang says: I woke up one day to see a stray cat sitting on the deck. Being the unsafe, careless person I am, I went outside to try and pet her. Unlike the other strays that run when people approach them, this cat approached me! As the only "cat person" in the family, it seemed unlikely that we would be keeping this cat. We searched around the neighborhood to see if she belonged to anyone...and we turned up with nothing. My father fed her steak, turkey, and all sorts of other meaty goodies, and she always returned to us. Every morning we would find her waiting outside on the porch, and all I had to do was sit down on the bench and she would jump up on my lap to be petted--I couldn't take her off! Eventually my parents were okay with the idea of her sticking around, but they still didn't want her inside the house, no matter how I protested. They still considered her as a stray we fed, not a cat of our own. But it truly didn't seem that way, since we were buying her toys and cat food by then, and we upgraded her cardboard box bed (yes, we made her a bed to sleep in) to a plush bed from the stores. Even my mother, who hated cats and had never touched one in her life, began to love Bayonetta. The year she "adopted" us was the year we had a horrendous snow storm. During the day we would let her do as she pleased--I even went outside to sit with and pet her until I lost the feeling in my fingers--until night time, where she alternated between sleeping in father's tool shed and the small playhouse he built for me when I was no older than 10. The winter passed and Bayo started to get...promiscuous at this time. We had really hoped to get her spayed but we were too late, and on April 12 she had 5 wonderful babies. She was a wonderful and caring mother, and protective, but she still let us pick up and pet her babies--although my mother still didn't want to. As they got older, however, she did begin to pick them up to move them, albeit with gloves. On June 1, Bayo wasn't with the babies in their playhouse in the morning, and she didn't come running to meet me from the school bus in the afternoon as she did each day (the only exception being the day she had her babies, for obvious reasons). After the rain of the day stopped, I searched around the yard but couldn't find her. I thought that she was visiting the park a few feet away, catching birds as usual. When mother returned home she also set out to look for her. She came back inside crying. Bayonetta was dead under the deck. Bayonetta seemed very young, and we still aren't sure why she died, but my father claims to have seen her act as though she was very sick the day before. But no matter what happened, she is in a better place now, and we've buried her close to the house. The kittens are doing fine, knock-on-wood, and we've even brought them inside the house. My mother sits with them and pets them frequently.