A cat story with relevance to current events, Pt. 5

I was heartbroken. My Annie was gone. We searched for her everywhere. We asked neighbors and called everyone we knew. She was nowhere to be found. Karin had grown tired of Tammy's incessant squawking and willingly gave her to me as my own. But I missed Annie. A month or so later, as my Dad sat reading the newspaper, I noticed a picture on the front page. It was a photo of a cat in an antique store in a town 10 miles away. The closer I looked, I began to notice that the cat in the picture looked very much like my very own Annie. The next day, we all traveled to the store to see for ourselves. Sure enough, there she was.

As the store owners told the story of how she just walked in one day, we marveled at the over ten mile distance the not-yet-full-grown kitten had traveled to end up on their doorstep. I asked the owners of the store what they had named her and they said, "Sam." They explained that they originally thought he was a girl, but when they took her to the Vet to have her fixed, the Vet informed them that "she" was actually a "he." Turns out mistaken sexual identity ran in the family, which was just one more thing in a long line of weirdness that was about to get weirder.

That summer, Tammy slept on my bed every night. One morning she was gone when I woke up. Before I could wonder where she had wandered off to, a blood curdling scream erupted from my sisters' bedroom. An animal was behind Karin's dresser, and it was bloody. The scream must have scared it silly, because whatever it was flew into my room and dove under my bed. I quickly pulled out all the stuff and found the mystery animal. It was Tammy, and she was indeed bloody. Something must have attacked her in the night, and her fur had completely separated from her tail bone. She had lost a lot of blood, and the Vet said her tail would never heal properly. He performed surgery on her and removed her tail. So now I had a tailless cat. While the vet was doing the surgery, he also removed two testicles. That's right, Tammy was a boy. (I told you this story was weird.) Tammy lived a long life, all without a tail, and all of it as a boy. And no, we never changed his name. One more thing, in case you're wondering about my sister Kristen's boy kitten, you guessed right, it was a girl.

And so ends the strange story of Smokey, Annie (Sam,) and Tammy; and the story of four crazy kids with a crazy plan to surprise their Mom.