For exactly a week she had been cooped up in a cage, but she did not know what weeks were, or days, only the cycle of eating and sleeping, as much as she dared in this place, the dark coming suddenly with the exit of the people from the room. Her initial terror had given way to a general warriness that danger was all about her.
They had stuck needles into her, repeatedly. Had made her sleep and when she woke she was in pain, the fur gone from her belly and the sense that something, she knew not what, was irrevocably changed. Still she was here, still in this indoor place cut off from all she had ever known. Her mind searched in tightly wound circles for answers, but there were none. Kind tones from the strangers and the intonation of the sound he made to her was the only comfort that came her way.
And as strangely as it had began, the tall boy with the ball cap woke her and reached into her cage. This was it, no doubt, her life was about to end or return and she was powerless to stop him, no where to run, nothing she could do. His rough hands guided her into the box as she recalled its smell, like old dankness in the room she rarely ventured, vaguely like other cats and a hint of something else, too far gone to tell when whoosh! up and away from the table, her claws could penetrate nothing, she faltered and cried out, she hated this.
Down the corridor her wide eyed terror tinged with the essential need to find out all she could, look for any out, any crack in the system that would allow her to get her head thru. If she could get her head out she was half way, where? The sounds all around her, animals she could not see or smell correctly, there, he is.
A cry, a wail, please, be real, don't be a dream, please undo this thing and put me back the way I was, she cried, long and hard. The familiar face bent down to the wire door and cooed, a familiar finger reached thru and she touched her nose to it, it was. It was.
Thru the door, into the heat, into to the box he put himself in to every day to leave, the air suddenly growing cooler and the sound of engine. The sky over head moved, she felt herself this way and that and she knew, it was almost over.
Meow? he said.
Meoooow! She replied, and reflexively, from deep within her, she relaxed and squinted her eyes as she let out the softest coo.