The Nine Lives of a Cat

From the moment I was born the world was against me.

That was what led me to stand in the middle of the road, mesmerized by the bright headlights of the car coming my way. The ground trembled beneath my paws, a deep vibration crawling up my legs. The sound—that low, guttural growl filled my ears, devouring my thoughts, and just like that, I was small again. So small I couldn’t see yet, and freezing cold.

Stuffed in a box and left to rot on the side of the road, my siblings and I cried, screamed, whimpered—but the world did not listen. Our voices too small. Our lives too insignificant. I didn’t know how many we were or how loud we screamed. But it didn’t matter. No one came. No one cared.

The hunger burned holes in my stomach, sharp and unbearable, but soon it dulled into something worse: a quiet, aching emptiness. The kind that settled into my bones, whispering that this was how it would end.

Then came the rain, cold and relentless. It poured through our cardboard prison, soaking into our fur, pressing us closer together. The walls sagged under the weight of the storm, turning soft, fragile. Who realized it first was beyond my knowledge, but suddenly we were all moving—tiny paws tearing at the wet paper walls, pushing through, spilling out into the night.

For a moment, I thought we had won.

My siblings squeaked, excited, their tiny voices lifting with hope. A dull thud, like something closing, muffled their sounds, followed by a deep, guttural growl. The ground trembled beneath me, vibrations crawling up my paws as the beast rumbled away, fading into the distance. Then—silence.

The kind of silence that didn’t belong in a world that still breathed.

I called for them, but no one answered. They had been here a moment ago. Right here. And now they were gone.

I pressed myself into the ground, trembling like a leaf in the piercing wind. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what had taken them. All I knew was that it had left me behind. It had left me all alone.

I didn’t know how I survived that night. Only that I did. And that was the cruelest part of all. My body had carried me forward, though my heart had been left behind, and when I found shelter, it was in a place thick with the scent of fur and hay. Was it luck? That a mother was there, feeding me along with her own kittens, but not wanting me?

No. Life could not be considered lucky. Pity was all it was. So, when I no longer needed milk, I was cast aside, chased away, forgotten. And I had been all alone ever since.

The growl was back, the world rushing into focus.

A honk.

A screech.

A life eaten whole.

I woke up with an immense pain in my tail, but when I looked back, there was none. A normal reaction might have been shock, or at the very least a snare of regret, but like my tail, I had lost it with my third life.

Three down, six to go, I thought as I rose from beside the curb, feeling numb inside despite the pain thumping in my body.

I figured it best to find something to eat, so I made my way down the road and down the stairs to the subway station. Regardless of having died three times throughout my nine lives, I had never been alive, not even once. The closest to living must have been when I was in that cardboard box. Or perhaps when I got cast out by the mother cat that fed me, and I had to follow the road for days until I arrived at the city where I later lost my first life. Tall buildings stretched above me; I felt so small in this world. Stupidity had led me to believe the world consisted entirely of the cardboard box and that farmer's house.

At first, I had begged. But no one answered my calls. Ignored and all alone, I didn’t understand why no one wanted to help. Was something wrong with me?

Desperation had devoured my thoughts and senses, veering me to theft, and soon the scent of food filled my nostrils, urging me to follow, slip inside an alleyway, and past a few humans who—like the rest—were too busy to see anything but themselves.

I watched humans throw away food, yet no one spared me a single bite. I watched them meet my begging eyes, yet they all turned their backs to me. It took me mere minutes to realize that humans were greedy creatures; they wanted something in return for their help, and since I had nothing to offer but a warm hug, I was nothing to them. I was nothing.

Coming to terms with that, I did what was needed to survive. Sneaking towards the pile of trash, I scratched at the plastic bag until I could pop my head through to look for something to eat. Only what greeted me wasn't food. Beady black eyes. Yellowed teeth. A hiss. Then it lunged.

I barely had time to react before pain erupted across my face. Claws met fur. Teeth met flesh. I yowled, twisting wildly, but the rat was faster—smarter. A sharp sting raked across my left eye, and suddenly, the world blurred.

Panic clawed at my throat. I thrashed, tried to bite back, but I was too weak. The rat, full and fed, was stronger. Claws impaling my leg, I fell to the ground, my head cracking against the pavement. The world wavered.

Then it was gone.

The rat. The hunger. The pain.

My first life.

I remembered having opened my eyes—long after I blacked out when the fight ended—and the world was still nowhere to be found. I remembered the peace, the same content feeling I imagined my former family must have felt when they had successfully dumped my siblings and I on the side of the road in a cheap box. Except the peace wasn’t real. Because the world came into focus, the sounds overwhelmed my ears; I knew for certain that peace was nothing to be found so long as I still breathed.

I breathed and I despised my lungs for stealing air I didn’t deserve, my heart for beating for nothing, myself because I was still here.

Not because I fought to survive.

Not because I wanted to.

But because life—this wretched, unrelenting thing—refused to let me go.

Regardless, I crawled to the trash, grabbing whatever crumbs that rat had left behind, and I had been breathing ever since, because ‘nine lives was such a gift,’ right? Fortunate? I thought not.

The subway was filled with people. Some walked in a hurry, frantic to get to their destination so fast they didn’t see a single second of the journey there.

I had heard them, humans, talk about my fortune. ‘Nine lives was such a gift, must be amazing to be a cat.’ How wrong they were. Nine lives was a curse I couldn’t escape. I had realized that the moment the rat had taken my first life back then.

Having lost three now, I loathed the six that were still left.

Humans, I despised too. Simply because I didn’t understand them. They had so many rules. And then they spoke of this thing called “love”. They spoke of it as if it was the greatest treasure—more important than life itself.

Love must’ve been an extraordinary achievement, one I doubted truly existed in a world like this. I had seen it blossom before, only for it to snap in half like a dried twig. So if love truly was, why did I only see it abandoned?

“What an ugly eye that cat has,” a voice lingered in the air. The humans didn’t want me; I was too ugly for their high standards. But the scent of food smelled from the trashcan, casting aside all their judgment, I measly jumped onto the metal to have a look inside. Before I even got the chance to dig in, another voice stole my attention. When I turned around, a group of stray cats were growling at me, claiming that this was their territory, therefore their trash. They didn’t hear me out, instead, they lunged at me, so I fled. I ran, but then a wall hindered me from going further, the train tracks to my left, and hostile cats surrounding me when I turned around.

My kind didn't want me either. They hissed at me, chased me away; I didn't belong. So one helped me, not even as the group of cats slithered towards me, forcing me to back up towards the tracks.

My foot slipped.

I fell.

A roar shrieked from a monster far more dangerous than the one who took my siblings away. When I looked towards the sound, I saw the only thing that wanted to help me. Death.

When the world returned, I couldn’t stand on my front paw without immense pain shooting up my leg. Humans would have said I was lucky for having three other legs to walk on instead.

One moment I was limping through the streets, walking as if the world had ceased to exist. The next, teeth sank into both sides of my belly, drool running over my back. My pads lost touch with the ground, and the world spun and twisted, everything a fast blur but I managed to see two big eyes and ears belonging to a big dog. My breath hitched, and before I could fight back, I hit the ground and darkness crept in. I was in too much pain to fight to keep my eyes open, but I heard a woman’s voice edged with distaste as she excused herself from lending a hand since I was 'such an ugly cat’. Then the darkness devoured me.

A moment off guard.

A fatal bite.

A life bled out.

Alone and barely breathing, I lay on the side of the road, pain evoking everywhere in my body, as I tried to get up.

I wandered into an ally where a group of people huddled around a small fire in a barrel, lying on dirty mattresses on the ground. For a moment I wondered if they were even alive but then I recalled lying on the ground just now, no one checking if I was still alive so why should I give them what they refused to give me?

Drawn by the warmth radiating from the fire, I got close, listening to the crackling and popping filling the air but not loud enough to drown out the noise of the city.

Unaware that a piece of the newspaper, used to light the fire, had fallen out of the barrel and landed in my fur, a sharp burn pierced across my already aching back. When I looked back to see what was going on, fire had caught hold of my fur, slowly but surely stretching to cover me. Terror struck, a dreadful cry tore from my dry throat, and I started moving around to put it out, but I didn’t know how. I was rubbing myself against the wall when it struck me that I was fighting for nothing. So, I closed my eyes and waited.

A warmth.

A burn.

A life reduced to cinders.

The next thing I knew, I had lost my sixth life, but when I propped my eyes open again, I was covered by some fabric.

“Stupid cat,” someone grumbled behind me, took the fabric off, and lay back down onto his mattress. I studied him, didn’t understand why anyone would help me when no one had my entire life. Though the fire was put out, there was a lingering burn—not just across my flesh, but in my chest, like the first warmth I had ever felt. Was it only that I hadn’t met the right people to ask for help?

I walked out of the alley, feeling more confused about humans than I’d ever been. Since I first arrived at the city, I was certain I knew exactly what humans were like—cruel, selfish, greedy. I had seen it all. Lost my second life to drunken men who thought it funny to beat the ugly cat up and leave it bleeding out in the streets. After that I had lost faith in humanity; I didn’t believe a single thing that came out of their mouths because it was all lies.

But… That homeless man had helped me. I still couldn’t figure it out, even as I lumped forward but not knowing where I was headed. A little boy in an open window of an apartment building caught my attention, calling out to me and awakening a curiosity I hadn’t felt for humans before one of them had helped me. Therefore, I jumped onto a trash bin, proceeded onto a fence until I cautiously jumped onto the windowsill. The boy looked normal, smelled normal, but didn’t act normal. He wasn’t looking at me with disgust. Quite the opposite—staring at me with a big grin that wasn’t forming cruel words about me. So, when he reached out, it wasn’t to hurt me but to… pet me?

But the moment didn’t last long as a woman stormed into the room, pulling the kid into her arms before shoving me back, causing me to fall down the two stories. I met the woman’s eyes, and sure enough, disgust was etched into the corners, looking like the feet of a crow. It felt as though the warmth, the homeless guy left, had been put out and replaced with a coldness so freezing, I didn’t rotate my body to land on my feet. Instead, I just let myself fall, looking into the eyes of a monster.

A mistaken trust.

A shove.

A life forgotten with a thump.

The moon was high in the night when I woke up in the same place. I didn’t check for injuries; if the pain everywhere was any indication, it was bad, so I just hoppled away. It was a mistake to put my trust in humans, but now I couldn’t erase the child’s eyes from my memory. For when he had looked at me, he saw something soft and friendly.

But the adult saw only filth and ugliness. A pattern of humans seeing only what society wanted them to see. Perhaps the child wasn’t aware of the rules. I wasn’t either, but I was sure one of them forbade people from touching stray cats. Even worse, loving them.

Everyone had left me. Why was I the only one still holding on? Perhaps the right thing to do was to leave me too.

With that in mind, I wound up on a bridge. I had two lives left, but I didn’t want them. For I had truly lost all hope and faith in life and humanity. They were supposed to save me, but they ruined me instead.

I felt another kind of warmth blossom inside when I leaped from the bridge, feeling my heart smile as I broke through the surface of the cold water. My body was too tired, too worn out by life, that I couldn’t fight even if I wanted to. A current pulled me further down. Water filled my lungs. I choked, gasped for air but received only water.

Then I sank. Slowly.

It was quiet.

Then it was dark.

My last life refused to let me go. I coughed, sucking in air. The shore was quiet. A cold, heavy silence. I dragged myself to the water’s edge and peered down.

The reflection staring back wasn’t mine. Not anymore. Two eyes—one dull and clouded, the other sharp and burning—stared like strangers. I felt nothing for them. Nothing for the being I had become.

So, I turned away. Left the husk of my eighth life floating in the water and climbed, step after painful step, until the city shrank beneath me.

A rooftop. The edge. One final breath. I could do it. I had done it before.

But I wasn’t alone.

To my right, just a few paces down, a man stood at the ledge. Eyes looking down, just like mine.

He didn’t move when I limped towards him, only glanced sideways, a faint smile curling tired lips.

“So,” he said, “life failed you too.”

A pause.

“I didn’t know cats took their own lives too.”

I said nothing. Only sat beside him and stared into the night.

“You know,” he said eventually, “I won’t tell you not to jump. I want to jump too. But maybe... maybe there’s something out there. Something left.”

His voice cracked, barely a whisper now. “I don’t have anything. I lost it all.” I didn’t understand why he was here. A human. He was one of them—the ones who made the rules. Did he not understand them either? Had society broken him too? I didn’t understand. Didn’t understand why he was telling me this. Nor why I felt the need to rub my head gently against his shin. Not to stop him. Not to beg. Only to say: I’m here.

And maybe that was enough. For he stepped down, slow and unsure, and as he met my eyes, something humans tended to avoid, he leisurely stretched his hand out for me to inhale the scent of him. I cautiously sniffed. It didn’t smell like salvation, but it didn’t smell like death, either.

So, I followed his lead and jumped down from the ledge.

Not to live.

Just to be.