I saw a kitten bounce yesterday. Early Steve Martin juggling routines be damned. This was one of the most horrific events I’ve ever witnessed, and luckily my head was turned for the worst bits.
A woman in a red Toyota sped down Edgewood Ave., by the corner of Day Street, yesterday around 3:45 p.m. and, without slowing down, tossed three small kittens, one after the other, out of the car window.
One cat was saved by a woman who was at the right spot on the street at the right time and was blessed with extraordinary timing. She grabbed a kitten as it fell, wrapped it in a blanket, and presumably now has a friend for life.
The other two died. They hit the ground hard, though not hard enough to kill them immediately. The sight of a kitten with a smashed face flipping around the street like a flounder on a hook, spraying blood, is not easy to shake.
This was at the height of school-bus time, at a corner where not only a dozen different buses stop but where a new school opened just this fall. I was able to steer my own daughters home without them having any idea what had happened. Other parents had some tearful talks ahead.
Day Street is a block away from Kensington St., a neighborhood which birthed a notorious street gang. Some would claim that such neighborhoods become immune to violence. That’s not what I saw in the aftermath of the hurtling kittens. A corps of extraordinary women attempted to chase the car, screaming at the driver. They watched over the dying kittens while phoning for help and banging on the door of the nearby police sub station. For a quarter of an hour they diverted traffic around the dead kittens, until a Liveable Cities representative arrived to move the bodies.
The women were incensed, involved, apoplectic with rage at the inhuman monster who could toss living creatures blithely from a car to their doom. One of the women told of how she’d rescued a kitten from a similar fate once, finding it in a box on a street and taking it home.
Hope and community amid the horror. Glad I don’t have to be back at the bus stop for a few days, but will have some great people to talk to when I do.