The evening before Halloween, I was standing in the kitchen with the Lodger when I heard a cat peep.

Now, three of our cats peep, one screams (she’s deaf), and one doesn’t make a noise (she tries to miaow and makes a sibilant hiss—it’s very adorable).

This peep, however, sounded as if it was coming from outside. The Lodger said they had been hearing a similar noise throughout the day. So we called Ken from his office in the basement and went outside to see what was going on. The peeps were coming from my car, and when we opened the hood, we saw a tiny gray kitten sitting on top of the engine.

A kitten that was very, very speedy.

Long story short, we chased the kitten up and down the neighborhood on and off throughout the night, pausing to drive 20 minutes to pick up a kitten trap offered by a stranger on Facebook. We eventually trapped the kitten and put it in our upstairs bathroom.

Before we even got it, I said that its name should be Hallows. Well, you know what happens when you name a stray. You kinda already have decided to keep it.

We didn’t make a final decision until Nov 5 when we took it to the vet. We wanted to make sure it didn’t have anything communicable to our other cats (that was a deal-breaker). By that time, though, it was purring and yelling for more food and willing to be cuddled.

Turned out we had misgendered it and lo, we had a bouncing baby boy! Relatively healthy, with ear mites and worms (not surprising), and a healed evulsion on his mouth that we still need to have checked out at a feline dentist.

I will note that I wore my Totally Sane Cat Lady shirt to the vet. It didn’t help.

Hallows chose to sit on the engine of my car and yell at us, and Ken and I already know we have a big S for Sucker on our foreheads written in a font only cats can read.

Everybody, meet Hallows.
Six cats. What have we done?

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