Toby

The city has a rhythm. Once you've got the beat, you can do anything. I'm a cat that knows from experience, the city can be a hard place, but once you've got it down, there's nothing that can stop you. 1

When I was just a kit, I was in a litter of 7 cats, my mother was taken away from us the moment we were born and we never knew our father. Some man in a large cloak stole us from our family and placed us in a large brown box. People walked down the street and bent down to pet us, some even took a cat home, but eventually, I was the only one left. One stormy night, my box filled with water. I wailed loudly, but there was no one around to hear or care. A few females and males, known to cats as “nopaws,” walked down the street with huge things over their heads, shielding them from the rain. Right when I thought I was going to drown, the box tore and I was flushed down onto the road in a stream of water. The streets were flooded and I kicked furiously trying to keep my head above the surface. The water was carrying me towards a large hole in the side of a cement walkway. The hole was swallowing up the water, taking it into a dark abyss. I fought hard to make my way to the side of the curb and hauled myself out of the water, coughing up some while I tried to catch my breath. The rain was falling out of the sky in huge masses and I stumbled over to a large wooden thing that I heard the nopaws call a bench.