Panic In Prison

by Mewsette

Do you want to hear a horrifying true story? Have I ever been in a panic? Well, yes, lots of times. I forget how many. I'm a calico, and calicos can be bundles of raw nerves. Maybe we panic easily. But I'll never forget the worst one! Long ago and far away, when I was only 12 (the age my little sisfur will be soon), we lived in a nice little house on top of a mountain. I loved it there; it was purrfect. Life wasn't, but my house was. I was starting to settle down after 4 years of trying and failing to convince my mom I was not cut out to be an indoor cat. That's another story, never mind. Then, one purrfectly nice day in late summer, that started out like any other day, turned into Panic Day. The first thing I noticed was all three cat carriers lined up on the kitchen counter. I thought I knew what that meant; my mom was gonna take all three of us girls to the vet at once. Was she nuts? I was enough of a handful all by myself. But she'd been doing strange things for weeks, like packing all the books in boxes and stacking them up. What was she gonna read? Putting all the pots and pans in cartons. How was she gonna cook? Boxes, boxes everywhere. But I was still young and limber; I liked the new high places to survey my Queendom from. My gene for "suspicious" hadn't kicked in yet. I was slipping. No, we weren't going to the vet. We were gonna be locked up in prison! And I was the first to get locked up because at least I was the hardest to fool. Then my furmama got locked up next to me, and even my sisfur, who was still too young to suspect such a horrible fate, got locked up. And the Panic began. My mom let some big men into the house, who started carrying all the boxes and all our furniture out of it! We, in our prisons, got left in a bedroom till they got to that room, too. Then we got moved back to the kitchen counter. I was in a frenzy. I was terrified! And I was never a quiet cat to begin with. I shrieked, I howled, I cried, I thrashed around in my prison. I called down the wrath of the cat gods on everyone in the house, and it did no good. I rubbed all the fur off my nose on the bars of the carrier, and no one took pity on me. I even feigned hyperventilating to get out of there. My mom just shut the house doors and told the men to stop, took me out and stared in my eyes and my mouth, held me and crooned at me a little bit (it did Not help!), gave me a drink of water, and shoved me right back in my prison! And the horrible men carried stuff out of my house until it was empty! Then I heard a truck drive away, and my mom finally let me out of prison. Oh yes, and let my furmama and my sisfur out of theirs, too. What they had been so quiet about all that time, I don't know! First we all ran to see if our litter boxes were still there. Thank goodness, they were! So were our food and water dishes. But where were we going to sleep, on the cold hard floor? Then (you won't believe this!) when we wasn't looking, our formerly trustworthy mom picked us up and put us back in prison!! Me first, of course! And she carried the few things left out to put them in her car. Even our litter boxes!! That's when I screamed like a banshee. I just knew somehow I was gonna die! Last of all, she carried us girls in our prisons out and put us in the car too. I got the front seat space cause Mom was looking at me awful worried. And we started driving. And we drove and we drove. Fur hours. I screamed all the way. My furmama pooped in her prison to show what she thought of all this. My sisfur didn't have any better sense than to be quiet the whole way. I hadn't taught her enough yet. Finally, after my mom had stopped at the side of the road twice to quiet me down and told me I was gonna have a heart attack if I didn't quit it, (I didn't quit!) we stopped in front of a strange house. A big white one. It wasn't mine. And we all got carried in there. Some of our stuff was there, like our extra beds that had disappeared days back. Mom carried in all the rest. And finally, finally, we got released from prison! There was a lot to investigate in this new place, and there was a second shorter imprisonment to go through the next day, when the men brought back all our furniture they took away from us. From there, it was a new place and new stories. But Panic Day was over.