The sole survivor of someone's "happily ever after" fantasy
A few weeks ago, people started saying they'd seen a kitten at the barn where I board my horses. I didn't think much of it until about a week later, when I found a kitten in bad shape in a horse's stall. It was mewing frantically as I rounded the corner, and when I spotted it, it was struggling to get up. The horse's hind foot was hardly an inch in front of the kitten's body.
I ran into the stall to rescue the kitten, but soon after I picked it up, it went into a nearly comatose state. It was barely breathing, its eyes were crossed and unresponsive, and the only sign that it was still alive was the feeble protest it sometimes made by opening and closing its mouth when I moved it around. It was pretty clear the poor thing had been stepped on -- and only just before I arrived on the scene, too, if the frantic cries that drew me were any indication.
