Myth Happens

So there are these kittens.

They were born on March 12, 2014, the smallest two of a litter of five. Their mother was rescued, heavily pregnant, from an overcrowded cat-hoarding house; she gave birth almost immediately afterward in Angell MSPCA's care, which is how we happened to meet the kittens in their second week of life. They were tiny black fluffballs then, resembling Miyazaki's soot sprites more than anything feline. Lily had named them all after Greek gods and heroes—Zeus for the regal white blaze on its chest, Odysseus for its adventuring, Ares for its proclivity to pounce (at this point in life, a sort of coordinated stumble and flop) on its littermates. Dean and Nora were already calling the littlest one the runt. It was conspicuous by its huge seven-toed forefeet and its piercing cry whenever anyone tried to pick it up, so that the mother cat would come running, ears pricked and tail questioning, to retrieve and calm her child. I picked it up. It didn't cry piercingly. That was the start.

We couldn't promise, but we hoped we would have our lives settled enough to adopt within six weeks. We came back twice more. (We learned on our second visit that Odysseus—Odi—had died from congenital complications; it was upsetting, but at least not contagious. The other kittens thrived.) We watched Zeus' brows and whiskers come in white to match its tuxedo front, Ares' arms speckle salt-and-pepper, all of their eyes darken from kitten-blue. The runt was getting bigger, more and more fearless: trying to climb inside my shirt, leaping from my shoulder to the futon, falling asleep on Rob's chest and refusing to relinquish his lap even at the end of a visit. It had plainly adopted us. It ran right to me the next time. We had named the fourth survivor Hestia, because she curled so calmly while the others rough-and-tumbled, but she was such a self-contained little enigma Rob began to think of her as X the Unknown.

(And of course at this point we didn't know any of their sexes. It wasn't until the last visit, when the runt was on its back scuffling with Ares, that we spotted some previously undetectable undercarriage and wondered if it might be male. We had cautiously thought of it as Persephone before now, being so small and shadowy, its mother bearing it back and forth.)

And then at the beginning of this week our lives went from zero to kitten when we found out that not only were the kittens coming up on their eight-weeks-and-two-pounds deadline for return to Angell, but there were other families interested in adopting from the same litter. We notified Angell MSPCA. We secured permission from our landlord to keep cats in our apartment. We filed an application to adopt with the manager of the foster care program. And we did not expect to be told on Tuesday that we could take our kittens home in two days' time.

There was a lot of cleaning. There was a lot of running around. By audioboy's good graces and driver's license, we picked up most of the cat basics from Petsmart in Fresh Pond on our way to Angell yesterday afternoon. We have the world's pinkest cat carrier. (It was the only color in its size.) And by five o'clock in the afternoon, we had two small cats in it, resting on my lap in post-fixing sedation, four pounds of black fur and paper collar nametag and soft breathing.

Once the sedation wore off, they turned into fire-raisers. As I type these words, Hestia is curled up on the windowsill behind the couch, watching birds and cars in the street, and her brother is curled up under the couch, occasionally nosing at my ankles, and this is the quietest they've been since they woke up. I watched them rocket over a sleeping derspatchel. They play-fight with ferocity and are death to the little toy fish-mice we bought them on Tuesday, before we got home and checked e-mail and found out we should have bought a lot more. Quick, clever, graceful. Polydactyl. Hestia is still wearing her paper collar, since efforts to take it off last night left my husband with scratches across his palm and eyebrow and my father with a soundly punched vampiric bite; she's calm enough now to lie near us, and brush against us, and even tolerate some gentle petting, but I think anything like being picked up is off the table for now. The ex-runt is enthusiastically affectionate. He rides shoulders and nuzzles into hands. I fell asleep last night on the couch with him curled against my chest, under my shirt. He walked back and forth across my laptop and confused it mightily.

My father refers to him as the King of Greece, after the myth that the true heir of the Byzantines will have more than the usual number of fingers and toes. My mother calls him Tybalt, Prince of Cats. We have decided that Tybalt Autolycus is a good full name. (As soon as we knew he wasn't a Hermes, but saw the way his paws fanned into opposable thumbs with which he merrily lifted sticks and feather toys, it became clear he might do very well as a Mercury-littered snapper-up of unconsidered trifles and even some trifles people consider very dearly indeed, thank you. He stalked and slew my sock last night, then stuffed it in his mouth and trotted around parading his kill. I will probably never get it back.) His eyes are celadon green; he was a fragile thing at birth, but he looks like he might grow up into a monster cat. Hestia remains Hestia, but she hunts and fights like an Athene—Rob has seen her stalk her brother while he's echolocating for her, keeping stealthily just out of reach until it's time for a strategic strike. She has a more delicate, Siamese look, with wide gold-fringed eyes and a slender throat; the collar makes her look a little like Jenny Linsky. She is still protective of her belly, but she doesn't shy under the futon every time she sees me looking anymore. She has wicked claws. Any good hearth-defender should.

I have not had steady cats in my life since I was twelve years old. I like these ones very much. I am looking forward from here on.