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Sully’s eyes shot open and he jackknifed up in bed. What in the hell was that? A monster? The vengeful spirit of the house’s original owner?
“OOOOOOOOW!”
Then he remembered. Not a vengeful spirit. Just a vengeful cat formerly known as Petunia. He still hadn’t thought of a new name for the beast.
“OOOOOOOW!” came the mournful cry from his bathroom. Sully shoved his glasses onto his face and glanced at his Batman clock. 4:00 AM on the dot. For the hundredth time in the past 12 hours, he considered dropping the cat off at the Yucca Hills Animal Rescue, then peeling out of the parking lot so fast he left tire marks behind.
Groaning again, Sully staggered out of bed. He didn’t even dare look at his sleep stats today. Instead, he walked to the half-finished bathroom and threw open the door. There was Cat Formerly Known as Petunia, hiding behind the toilet. And… yep, she’d pissed and shit on the floor instead of the new litter box in the corner. Because why should any part of this be easy?
“What the hell is wrong with you, Cat Formerly Known as Petunia?” Sully asked, his voice creaking with sleep.
The cat stared at him with icy blue eyes. Her fluffy copper tail swished from side to side.
“You know, I’d let you out of the bathroom if you just used the litter box.”
The cat seemed to retreat further behind the toilet. Sully sat on the cool tile floor, careful to stay far away from the cat’s previous deposits. Slowly, carefully, he reached a hand toward the cat.
A low growl rumbled in her chest. Sully pulled back his hand. He needed his fingers.
“That’s it,” he grumbled. He’d put on some pants, shove the cat in the trap, and drop it off at the animal shelter… possibly while his car was still in motion.
He stared at the cat. She stared back. Then, like clouds parting in a storm, his anger dissipated.
She’s scared,Sully reminded himself. And no wonder, considering where she came from. Cat Formerly Known as Petunia had lived her whole life with a frail, elderly hoarder.
“I bet she never cleaned your litter box,” Sully mused. “Is that why you don’t want to use it now?”
What if the woman forgot to feed the cat? Sully tried to imagine living in a house filled with rotting food and moldy newspapers; a place with nowhere to sit or rest or climb and play.
“It must have been awful,” Sully realized out loud.
The cat hissed again. Her sharp blue eyes reminded Sully of a certainsomeonewho also used anger to hide her pain.
“Hiss all you want, you Queen of Sheba,” he told the cat. “I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
After all, Sully Brooks wasn’t afraid of a challenge. In fact, he enjoyed difficult projects. His years of spinning mind-numbing amounts of code into beautiful applications had taught him discipline, consistency, and—above all—patience.
He left the bathroom and padded into the guest room that served as his office. Dropping into the office chair, he booted up his computer. A column of folders ran down the side of his desktop,The Sully Project, The Girlfriend Project, andThe Ugly Duckling Project.
Sully ignored the folders. He pulled up a search browser and typed, “How to deal with difficult cats.” Links to thousands of videos, articles, and books poured onto his screen.
“MEEEEEEEEOW,” came a long, angry yowl from the bathroom.
Sully clicked back to his desktop and created a new folder at the top of the column.
Title of the folder?
He cracked his fingers and typed.
TheSheba Project
Ch. 29 Alanna
SweattrickleddownAlanna’sback as she plodded in her white Asics down the same sidewalks as yesterday.
“Petunia,” she called dejectedly. The sun sat low in the sky. It’d be getting dark soon. Day two of Operation Rescue Petunia was going just about as well as day one. Which was to say it was an abysmal failure. The highlight of the search, so far, had featured Alanna carefully studying a flattened skunk in the road to make sure it wasn’t, in fact, an orange-and-white cat.
As Alanna turned a corner and made way for a woman jogging in the opposite direction, she struggled to focus on the task at hand.Find the cat,she told herself, but her mind kept traveling back to this morning and her mother’s appointment with the rheumatologist.
