BlackBeary jerks awake from her eleventh nap of the day, frightened that she might still be at The Vet. [Cue ominous music.] Still drowsy she wonders: What if they gave her something, some awful drug to make her sleep? And what if her human left her there?

But the smell of the not-so-stinky, not-so-new sofa reassures her that she is at home and safe. Still she doesn’t rest easy. Every time she closes her eyes, the memory of the day’s events floods back like a really big flood, like a Katrina-big flood, like a flood of biblical proportions. Everything she fretted about all morning, all the time she was being starved, everything came true over the course of several hours.

First, weak from hunger, she was easily tricked into the nasty plastic prison. She was then thrust into a moving vehicle with a maniac– her human –at the wheel. The only saving grace of the trip was that, about two miles or so away from home, her human allowed her to come out of the prison. Another cat, a strange cat, no cat BlackBeary knows had obviously been in that awful mesh cage at some time since she last visited The Vet. [She’s pretty sure her human tried to clean it, but even five hundred gallons of Listerine can’t cover the smell of other.] So after much full-lung-capacity howling, BlackBeary’s human opened the awful prison and put BlackBeary on her lap where she rode during the trip to and from The Vet. Sadly, her human didn’t take the Miata which would have almost made the driving part almost okay. Instead they rode in the way-less-cool Mini because it was raining.

Once they were at The Vet, they were shunted into a claustrophobic blah-formica-clad room, painted in drab shades of beige that are probably supposed to be soothing. But aren’t.

BlackBeary searched every nook, every corner and cranny, although she still isn’t sure what a cranny is. There were no windows. The doors wouldn’t open, and the cracks beneath the doors were far too small to even shove a paw under, much less escape. And her human, well her human just sat there taking pictures, like that would help.

After a few minutes, Dr. “Hello, widdle pu’kin girl” Crow sauntered in, picked up BlackBeary and then commenced to talk to BlackBeary’s human as if BlackBeary weren’t even there. Dr. Crow, then took BlackBeary In The Back so that her human would never ever know all the insane, inhumane, Vincent Price-ish type torture they had in store for BlackBeary.

In The Back Dr. Crow’s assistants, Igor and Satan Jr., poked and probed and pinched and prodded BlackBeary, ’till she thought she would pass out from fright. They even pilled her with a little pill-gun. “Open wide widdle pu’kin girl…” Pop and the pill goes straight down BlackBeary’s throat. Aliens got nothing on Dr. Crow’s assistants what with their so-called thermometers and pill-guns. They even trimmed BlackBeary’s nails, like she’s not capable of doing her own grooming.

And when it was done, when all the torment was over, Dr. Crow put on her bestest, most no-I’m-not-evil smile and carried BlackBeary back to her totally-dumb, unsuspecting human.

Is it any wonder that BlackBeary’s blood pressure was sky high?