She lay curled into a tight ball of gray and orange fur.  The other shelter cats moved around her like a tide of many colors.  They meowed, begging for our attention, ate kibble from large bowls or hissed at each other.  The tension in this room of the shelter was high – too many cats in too close quarters.  The air smelled of cat urine, oily feline bodies and kibble.

Despite all the commotion around her, the gray cat with little brush strokes of orange across her coat lay still, as if none of it concerned her in the least, as if she was trying to tune out the life around her.

My husband and I, volunteers at the cat shelter, played with the other cats.  We held, stroked and talked to them, trying to give them the attention they so badly needed.  We’d been coming to the shelter for several weeks now, but because the little gray and orange cat kept to herself, we never learned her name or her story.

One Sunday we were about to go home, when we noticed her.  When we came up to the shelf where she lay, we both touched her and stroked her.  She ignored us, as if she didn’t want to let herself feel anything.  We persisted and she finally opened her pale green eyes.  I saw such hopelessness in them that my throat tightened.

My husband picked her up, petted and talked to her.  At first she was quiet, almost limp in his arms.  Then she started to purr.  When I looked into her eyes again I knew what we had to do.  Although we had lost our dear feline companion to a car accident eight months ago and weren’t planning on adopting a new cat anytime soon, there was something about the gray and orange cat that touched us both in an unexpected way.  We looked at each other and we knew.

We found out that her name was Oatmeal and that she had been adopted and returned twice.  She had a sweet and affectionate personality, but her previous owners couldn’t care for her for various reasons.  Next Saturday when we came to take her home, she saw us through one of the windows in the shelter room where she lived and came to the door.  There we found her, waiting for us and ready to go, minus a bindle of possessions over her shoulder.

We had the staff put her in our cat carrier to take her home.  On the way out, as always, I wished I could take all the cats home – so many pairs of feline eyes full of broken hopes.

Because Oatmeal seemed like such a bland name for our new cat with her bubbly and affectionate personality, we renamed her.  She is now Solstice, because we adopted her near the summer solstice and because the little touches of orange coloring in her gray fur look like glimpses of the sun through the clouds.  Sometimes we refer to her as our angel cat, because she helped us heal from the loss of our cat that had passed away.

A Witch Without Magic – Paranormal Fantasy Novel

Cursed by an insane nymph that stole her magic, Belladonna now must find more mundane ways to earn a living. After all, she has a slew of house-mates to support: a ghost, a house guardian spirit, and twenty-one cats. When everyone on her street except her begins to age at an alarming rate, she gets the blame. To save her neighbors and prove her innocence, she must travel to the Otherworld where her worst fears will come to life.