About a month ago one of our neighbours came to the door asking if we’d seen their cat. He showed me a picture on his phone, a nice looking grey longhair, and I didn’t recognise it at all so of course I said no. I didn’t think about it again for a while until my flatmate text me at work to say that he thought it might have been stuck in the garage.

I don’t go into the garage very often. It’s basically where I dump stuff that I don’t give a shit about, but don’t want to throw away since I’ve got a little of the hoarder in me. But my late grandmother’s stuff has been stored in there since I moved in, and my flatmate keeps his motorcycle in there, and goes in there every couple of weeks to check it out and go for a ride. He’d gone in there to go for a ride and found grey fur covering everything and a bad smell. He went for a climb over everything to see if he could see a body, as there was no meowing or any movement, but could see nothing. He was feeling pretty shit about it all (and I didn’t help, walking past his computer room and meowing at him).

Fast forward to today, and my parents were coming over to take all of my grandmother’s stuff out to go through it, and work out what to sell and what to keep. We’ve been dreading it for a while since we didn’t want to go in and find a cat corpse (being a timid little city boy I can’t handle that sort of thing). We pulled a bunch of stuff out, looked under a bench, and then my flatmate says “Oh, I found it”.

Next there was some celebration as it ran away from him. Somehow the little bastard was still alive in there. It wouldn’t come out, being quite a timid little thing, but we managed to grab it and put it in our bathroom with some water and a little bit of beef mince to eat while we tried to find the owners. My flatmate called a vet and they said that it’d be fine as long as its eyes still looked bright, but not to feed it too much too quickly. It seems the owners moved away about three weeks ago, but one of the neighbours knew how to get hold of them, and they were around within an hour.

So, we had a cat stuck in our garage for at least five weeks, and the little bastard lived to tell the tale (and I totally just typoed ‘tail’ there). Goddamn cats.