Demon Clown Baby

Only a few weeks before I was to be married, my fiancé’s cat, Buster, went missing.

He used to be allowed out all the time. After a date, when I took Firestar home, he would come running up the street from wherever he’d been. If we were still in the car, he’d leap up on the hood and put his little paws on the windshield. We called him The Spy. One time I opened the window and he just came inside the car to greet us.

But I worried about him, being out so much. There are so many dangers with letting your cat roam free. But he wasn’t my cat. I could only seek to persuade. Firestar tried keeping him in, but the problem was, her mother didn’t really care if he got out. And he wanted out. Having had his freedom, he wasn’t interested in safety.

But finally, after he got a shoulder injury, which required some minor surgery to patch up, Firestar started keeping him indoors all the time. Oh, her mother didn’t start caring, but The Wrath of Firestar is a formdible motivation to be a little more conscientious.

He still got out from time to time, but he was mostly indoors and safe. Until my fiancé’s mother left the garage door open. He didn’t come home that night. He didn’t come home the next night.

No problem, he’d been gone before. But as the days passed, we started to get more and more worried. I was quite busy with wedding preparations and home remodeling, so I’m afraid that as long as Firestar didn’t seem worried, I didn’t give it that much thought.

But when she started voicing her fears, I realized how long it had been. We filed a lost cat report at the humane society and started checking there every other day. We found one cat named Pepsi that looked so much like Buster that, for a minute, we thought it might be. But that was wishful thinking. We were seeing what we wanted to see. The illusion broken we could tell he didn’t look anything like Buster, really, apart from superficial physical characteristics.

We started asking the neighbors. One couple said they might have seen him a week previous. No one else saw anything.

I printed up some lost cat flyers and put them up on all the telephone polls around.

The next Saturday, I printed 300 flyers and placed one at every single house in the neighborhood. Our best hope was that someone thought he was homeless and took him in. After a few days of no real leads, I started to prepare myself that he was gone for good.

This was pretty devastating. It’s bad enough for a loved one to die, but not knowing is so much worse. And it was only a few weeks before our wedding. How were we supposed to enjoy a wedding and honeymoon while picturing little Buster dying under a house somewhere?

Firestar was very brave, but this was a terrible torment, on top of all the pre-wedding stress, finishing up school, trying to take care of her house, and me trying to get mine ready.

I prayed many times a day that Buster would be returned to us.