Pinky

My writing partner gave me the line. "Our cat pinky was hit by a car."

No surprise. Pinky always played kamikaze with cars. However, hit by the car, wasn’t totally accurate. Pinky hit the car. He ran into it, bouncing off the wheel.

Rita, our neighbor saw the whole thing. She used her cell to tell me that Pinky was laying dazed in the gutter. The street where Pinky decided to play bullfight with him as the bull and the car as the toreador only had room for one car. Houses with the traditional picket fences were on each side.

We rushed out. Rita was standing by the cat. She explained what she'd seen. She took a tissue from her pocketbook and blew her nose.

My wife reached down and touched him. “He’s breathing.”

“He probably knocked himself out,” my wife said.

“I doubt if broke anything except his skull,” Rita said. She liked Pinky who often scrunched extra meals from her. When we first moved there, she thought Pinky was a stray until one day I was over at her house to return a dish she'd left at our place and Pinky sauntered in. “What are you doing here?”

“He’s a stray,” she’d said.

“Stray hell, he’s ours.”

“Con artist,” she’d said to him.

My wife ran to get a board so we could move him without doing much more damage. We put him in the car and headed to the vet. By the time we’d arrived, Pinky had come to, but we still went in.

“He seems okay,” the vet said. She was new in town. “But I suspect he’ll have a hell of a headache.”

She kept him overnight for observation. Later we would see Pinky sit by the side of the road. He never crossed the street again.