One Time with Kittens – A Middle School Short Story by Amanda Lawson

(Note sensitive content: implied, but not graphic nor gratuitous harm to animals.)

There was a mother cat who kept her young beneath the warped boards of an old porch. Five small creatures as soft as breath, the kind of beauty that finds the ignored alone and lonely men mistake for a curse, and the innocent run in the dirt. The children came in loud, like a weather that only moves, and saw the kittens and wanted them. Each one bore them away to keep in their hearts without malice, but in a space into which malice might one day grow.

They were put in small places, dressed in scraps of ribbon, and held to the sky as if the very air might gild them. With squeaks, faintly pure, the small things entranced to unknown designs, The play went out of them, and the small things grew quiet. They huddled in the strange corners where the children left them, their bodies shivering, their eyes gone dull. And when the children saw that the magic was not theirs to command, when the world did not attend to them, they set them down where they stood, and left them as they might discard a toy, whose workings had stripped and spoiled.

Slow mud heading home to screens and dusty shoes on sofas, no thoughts more than required for a hazy walk in the full safety of a low, red, fading afternoon. Settled and fed, one remembered the kittens, and was taken by curiosity and a brother's cold iPad that was immediate and unperipheral. A low battery for a hurried searching for nosey little furry stumbles, if not real.

Video, a garbage bag, cruelty, real and raw and without disguise, if or not could only be kittens. The oldest boy threw the tabletlike the thing had burned him. Another stared pale into the linoleum. He could not keep the sickness down and watched a faded shape of himself retching back until his small frame shuddered. And there was only air, and the room held them. Their backs were cold, and the boys were there. They're okay. They're okay. He wiped his mouth, half-open, and eyes wet and frightened, staring, unblinking, as if some hidden door had blown open to a dark world holding only the empty. But they were so cute, from a tiny breath.

391 words. Micro-fiction

Email invited fewer than words -so I am filling with words in case my submission would still be considered.

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