Stray - Entry 1: The Fall
We are a family of cats and I have lived within the abandoned walls for as long as I can remember. We didn’t know what the place was called, or what it had been for. To us, it was simply home. A maze of concrete and pipes becoming overgrown by plants, where the walls were warm in the sun and the nights were filled with the whisper of wind through the abandoned space. We belong here, in this quiet place of rust and ivy, where humans are long gone and only nature and silence remain.
I would spend the days with my brothers and sisters leaping across the gaps as we looked for food. We learned to drink from the dripping pipes and curl up together when the storms came. Tonight was one of those rainy and stormy nights. As rained poured down I played with my family before we curled up together and went to sleep.
I was awoken by a butterfly on my ear. The morning air is cool and damp. It is time to go. My paws pad quietly over the warm pipe, its surface slick but familiar beneath me. Around me, my family moves—three others like me, tails flicking, ears twitching.
We move as one—curious, unhurried—through concrete and dripping leaves as we look for food. The world above is strange and unreachable, yet down here the trees and plants bend through shattered walls and vines drink from cracks in the stone. Sunlight filters in golden shafts. I stretch, arching my back, claws scraping gently at the bark of a nearby tree. The ground is alive under me.
We play. A tap of the paw, a chase, a swat at a tail. My siblings’ eyes glimmer like small lanterns in the dim. The tunnel calls us deeper, and we follow, paws silent except for the occasional splash through puddles that mirror the glowing sky.
The path winds and bends, leading us along pipes and hanging steel girders until a narrow ledge waits. We carefully traverse a section of pipe, one after another, the way we always do. But when it’s my turn…
The metal shifts beneath me. A screeching groan. I fall from the pipe onto a section of steep slippery concrete. My claws dig, scraping desperately, but I can't climb up. The world tips, my family’s cries echoing as I fall, down, down into the dark.
Air rushes past me, and then—impact. Pain ripples through me, sharp and crushing. I lie still a moment before trying to stand. Slowly, shakily, I rise. I limp a few steps until my legs protest. My eyes blur and I collapse into an unconscious sleep.
I am awoken by the sound of metal. But when I regain my senses I hear nothing but the drip of water. A hollow silence fills this place, unnatural and heavy. It is dark with only electric lights illuminating the area. I am surrounded by garbage and as I walk forward the sounds of empty tin cans rolling across the floor echo through the chamber.
I walk forward in the direction of the light and find a partially raised sewer tunnel door that I walk under and what I see before me is astonishing.
