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Shady Acres and Kittens

profanereviewsPosted for Everyone to comment on, 5 years ago5 min read

Well, I've decided that it isn't smart to wait for this account to gain a following before I start telling stories, so I am going to switch up between reviews and stories until I get another account. I decided to tell this one for the cat lovers because this is the internet.

Okay, here we go.

Many years ago, amidst a deep depression, I left my life in eastern Canada to make my way in the oil and gas fields of northern BC. I was going to go out for the winter, because that was when everything got done.
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I got a job hauling gravel hither and to.
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There I met and befriended Jimmy. He's a series of stories himself, but we can't get into that right now.

Jimmy was from Kingston, about an hour from my hometown and at the end of the winter he suggested we rent a house in Fort St. John together. He told me that gravel truck drivers can work all year round.

That worked out for a while until my girlfriend decided that she was going to move out west too.

With her Great Dane, two cats and a rat.

I was living in a work camp, so couldn't really do any house hunting, but whenever the paper would show up, I was making calls.

Nobody would rent to us with the animals but then I saw an ad for a place that was for sale on a rent to own basis. I called and ended up buying it over the phone. She was coming in three weeks, and I needed a place. I really had no choice but to trust them.

It was in a trailer park called Shady Acres.

They weren't lying about the shady part. I have never seen such a melting pot of degenerates, and now I was one of them. My girlfriend then went into her own deep depression. There was a mushroom growing in the corner behind the dresser. I think it was feeding off the black mold under the trailer. When we moved in we went out to check the shed and found a cat skull there.

So after a long winter, I got home from work one March afternoon. I nodded to our drug dealer neighbour and said hello to our abusive, alcoholic neighbour on the other side. Then I heard it.

A tiny mew coming from up the hill. There was probably three feet of snow plowed up and no footprints going up, so I was trying to figure out where it was coming from.

"Hey Arnie. Do you hear a little cat?" I asked the drunk.

"Yeah, those fucking doper pieces of shit threw a kitten up the hill." He pointed to the drug dealer neighbours place. One of their kids was outside.

"Hey! Did you throw a cat up there?" I pointed to where the sound was coming from.

"Yeah. The other ones all died. Dad found them under our house. He told me to throw it up there."

The kid was maybe eight years old. It's hard to judge a kid when they're raised like that.

"Oh for fuck sake. I'll go get it." I climbed up the hill and found a tiny tortoiseshell kitten laying in the indent it had landed in. I picked it up and put it in my coat. It was shivering so bad.
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After I got it into the house, my girlfriend, who was a veterinary technician, said to put it out in the back room, because our cats weren't taking to it very well. I made it a bed and sat with it whenever I had a chance. The next day she was telling her work friend about the kitten and how we were going to take it to the BCSPCA on the weekend, when her friend said that she was looking for a kitten.

Win-win, right?

She came out the next afternoon and took little Maizey home. They just loved her. Her boyfriend would pick the cat up and rub her all over his face, giving her kisses and snuggles.

Ever hear of ringworm?

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Well, we all got it. Nobody as bad as her boyfriend though. He had it all over his face. He just loved her a bit too much.

I want to tell you that everything was amazing after that, but as Maizey got older she started to shred anything paper. Yeah, even money. I think it was mostly toilet paper rolls and shit like that, but all I kept telling myself was that I'm sure glad I didn't decide to keep that little fucker.

Thanks for checking this out. All photos are made by me except the kitten, which is from Pixabay.

P.S. We called it Shitty Acres, because it was shitty, and someone had spray painted "Shitty" overtop of "Shady" on their huge sign at the corner.

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