500 x 50: Short Stories for a Fast World

Strays

The stray cats lived in the maintenance closet, though you would not often find them there. During the day, the five of them wandered the apartment complex: playing in the shade by the pool, batting at the plants in the landscaping. Four kittens, one mother, content to slink and nibble and scrap and laze their day away.

Food was easy to come by. The complex's trash bins were continually full. And if that feast was not enough, passersby often carried Burger King or Wendy's meals, attempting to eat them in transit. None of these pedestrians were careful; many of them were especially wasteful. Bits of processed burger and chicken patty dotted the sidewalk in the afternoon, but were gone by evening. The cats ate them up.

The strays spent a surprising amount of time in the pool area, given their species' noted fear of water. But if you were to watch carefully, you would see that none of them, not even the mother, ever came within a foot of the pool. Instead, the cats played in the dirt under the clubhouse awning or climbed the stairs to the building's second level. Sometimes, they raced. While the apartment dwellers were busy at work or school or wherever they went during the day, the cats made the clubhouse theirs. In the evening, when the people came back, the cats moved on.

One of the kittens, the runt, a little black and white fellow with a timid cry, sometimes approached those who came to the pool during the cats' time. He did not cry out in fear or anger, nor did he accept the intruders. He approached, satisfied his curiosity, and then returned to the shade. One time, just once, I saw him rub his body against my neighbor's ankle, and I saw my neighbor smile.

As the sun began to set, the cats headed out toward the sidewalk and prowled the area between our apartment complex and the neighboring church. Or rather, the neighboring church's many parking lots.

The church was a large affair, hosting an entire Christian school and accompanying sports facilities and gathering halls and many other buildings. The church was less a church than a town unto itself, and all that town's parking surrounded our apartment complex, leaving the strays with not much to explore come evening. I often saw them pacing the tennis courts, the only structure of note that bordered our apartments. How they got in, I was never quite sure.

My wife and I took evening walks, usually around eight or nine. By that time, the cats had retired to the landscaping outside our clubhouse's maintenance closet, the door to which opened onto the sidewalk. The door was just a bit too short, creating a three inch opening through which the cats could crawl when the night turned cold, which it rarely did in summer. But in fall and winter, I'm sure the cats appreciated the shelter. And my wife and I appreciated having them there.

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