Almost exactly one year ago, I looked out on the side porch and saw that the little bucket of water we had put out for the stray cats had been tipped over. I went outside to clean it up and found a tiny little black and white hairball that began hissing and spitting at me as I approached it. It ran into a box, and I picked the box up and carried it inside. There were three kittens in there total; I named them Eenie, Meanie, and Miney, with the first one I met being Meanie.

Meanie had problems as a little kitten; she was lacking skeletal support in her rear end, and only had a tiny bony nub for a tail. She didn't like to be touched or handled there. One time she got her leg caught in some of the decorative metal work on a side table, and it obviously hurt her really bad since I had a hard time getting her leg out without her reducing my hand to a bloody stump, but I was able to get her free.

After a while my mom decided that we needed to give them all new names, and she gave Meanie the new name Bear because of how she resembled a bear. She also said that she runs like the Gatekeeper from Ghostbusters. Bear grew up to be a very sweet and loving cat, fluffy all over with a nubby tail, whose favorite time of day was dinner, and who enjoyed laying around the house and being petted and loved on constantly. She dearly wanted to be a housecat.

Yesterday I had instructions to keep the cats out of the house, since it was the shedding season and my parents were getting tired of finding clumps of black cat hair on the carpet. I put all the cats out; even though Bear wasn't one of the problem shedders, and wasn't doing anything besides being her lazy old self, I put her out too.

Dad came home a couple of hours later and told my mother and me that he found Bear lying by the side of the road. She was in the neighbor's yard across the road when she heard me open the door for feeding time; she was hit by a car as she was running back home.

I shouldn't have put her out.