That's not effing the verb, but rather the exclamation. Effing kittens.
On his way home from Bible study last Sunday night, under the big shrub near our bedroom window, Monstro saw a kitten. Flashlights wouldn't scare the thing out, so we opened a can of tuna, fashioned a box with foam and a dark towel and set it all under the trailer in our utility lot next door. Next day, we saw two kittens. Then three. Finally, the mom. She was orange and pretty, clean. One of her babies was also orange, the other two a mottled/stripey/tortoiseshell brown and black. Still fluffy, but eating solid food. At least, they seemed to understand what tuna was all about. The kittens would race along our neighbor's cinderblock fence and play in the hollowed-out tree that stood ten feet away from the trailer. Our own cats — shelter kitties themselves — were jealous/interested. We'd stare out our bedroom window and say we were watching the Nature Channel.
“Want a kitten?” I asked Sistermom.
“I would love one, but my cats wouldn't.”
Put them to sleep,” I advised. “You know, a fesh start.”
(She didn't go for it.)
We called the Animal Control officer and she NEVER called us back, though the ACO in the town over was helpful and gave me a couple of places to call.
Nobody wanted them. After three days of trying to place them, asking for cat traps on Freecycle, and reading feral-cat websites (“there are feral-cat websites?” my mom asked. Yes there are, and http://www.feralcat.com/ was particularly helpful) my buddy from MassWildlife offered traps and expertise, and came by Thursday at noon. We had the momma and the orange baby (my favorite) by 12:15. I called a woman I'd spoken with on Tuesday, but upon hearing that the orange kitten was the size of “two beer cans,” she demurred. And then my friend who was helping me got bit and everything went to hell.
My vet — rather, the vet where our cats are patients — was closed until 2:00 for an “emergency staff meeting” but we drove there anywhere, and a woman loading furniture up the ramp to the front door gave me a sheet of paper with directions to the MSPCA. (“Don't take them to the MSPCA in Springfield because…” said a lady I'd spoken to on Tuesday, not needing to finish the sentence.)
So then of course we get stuck in traffic, the cats quiet as mice in the hatchback. “Animals foretell doom,” my friend said. And that made me feel like shit, because of course my baby was with us too, and he didn't know anything that was going on, and he was really too little to be a part of this grim show, and we had planned to do the shopping for his first birthday party that afternoon anyway, and not deliver animals for slaughter.
The MSPCA is around the corner from the store that fired me when I was pregnant so I found it really easily, and we surrendered the big cat, and then took the kitten to the hospital across the room, because of course it was the kitten that bit my friend and would now suffer the desecration of a post-mortem rabies test, for which I was charged $193.00, for which my town is saying they're not going to reimburse me, regardless of the underlying public-health issue, and the long and the short of it is that on Thursday I hated Massachusetts more than I have ever hated Massachusetts in a single day, and there have been so very many of those days, I assure you. I dropped off my friend at the UMass health center to get her rabies shot, and got home to see the other two kittens in the traps we'd, uh, previously emptied. So I called the Mytown Animal Control Officer again, and upon hearing “If this is an emergency, please call the Pollice,” I left her a message at 4:10 and then called the cops. One came out and did nothing but get back into his patrol cruiser to call his supervisor, and then bring the cages up to our screened back porch. What followed was our biggest storm of the season to date, so Monstro asked, “do you want me to bring them down to the basement?” and I said “yes, and I'll help,” to which he responded, “no, I don't want you getting attached because you know what's going to have to happen,” but I helped anyway and hated New England even more, and my church and these dour people and God's Plan.
The Animal Control Officer got off her effing fat ass and called me at 7:00 Friday morning and I'm afraid I wasn't very nice to her at the end of it. She then called my potentially rabies-stricken friend and said she'd spoken with my husband twice that week, which was such a lie it still makes me sputter. In desperation, I googled “no kill cat shelter” and found one in Ludlow via 1-800-save-a-pet.com. Wouldn't you know it, it was run by the “two beer can” woman I'd spoken to the day before. I didn't let on that we'd previously held any conversations, which isn't as bad as what the ACO did, and anyway, screw you if you think it was. These kittens were significantly smaller than orange baby: I said they were “about a beer can” but they probably were more like a 16-ouncer. I surmise Orange Baby was that large because he was a Tom.
We were nearly out of newspaper by this time but found some for another hatchback trip with caged felines. Monstro drove them to her house. And she agreed to spay/neuter them, and then they'd be released to us, and live in a styrofoam cooler-house in our backyard, and we would feed them. “For how long?” Monstro asked. “Forever,” she replied. And that was great, I was fine with that, until two hours later she called back and the miracle had happened, her feral-cat expert deemed the kittens “rehabilitatible” and they would get sent to foster homes for socialization and, finally, adoption. They were fixed, uh, sexually, yesterday. This week they're being de-wormed. “They're much better than I'd originally thought,” said Beer Can Cat Lady. And if the rabies test comes back positive, we'll call her. But it won't. I just hope those concrete results come in before my friend has to get the series of shots in her abdomen. And two of the four were spared. I take comfort in the fact that the two that lived will live WAY better lives than we would ever have imagined. But where I come from, fifty percent is still an F.