Cats of Lockdown There was a cat with pearly paws and a tortoiseshell fur coat. Every day, it went to a restaurant and begged for food at the back door and the sympathetic manager would feed it the fish and meat scraps. Soon the cat forgot how to hunt for itself and instead would sit at the back door, meowing for food. She noticed that humans were leaving their homes a lot less, however, the restaurant was still open, even if the humans didn't hug like they used to. When her favourite human crouched down to stroke her, instead of feeling the soft sensation of the skin, there was the rubbery feeling of a glove and the human was wearing something over her mouth. But food was food, and she ate all of the fish and meat without complaining, before running along the wall back to her home, which was a run-down shed in the overgrown garden of an abandoned house. The next day, she woke up early because her stomach was growling, already thinking about the large bowl of food that the restaurant owners surely would have prepared for her by now, when she stopped outside, shocked. The restaurant was closed. No one was inside. The cat waited all day, sitting patiently outside the restaurant for it to open, for the lights to turn on and the tall female restaurant lady would put down the big bowl so she could have her meal, but it never did, and the restaurant lady never come out. The cat was forced to go through the bins to eat a rotten scrap of fatty fish. Yuck. For weeks and weeks, the cat had the same routine - wait, bin, repeat. However, the bins were becoming more and more empty as she had to walk all across town for rotten, manky scraps of old food. The cat was getting thinner and thinner. She woke up hungry and fell asleep hungry. One day, as her vision was blurry, the cat stumbled all over the town until she went into an apartment through the window and woke up on a soft sofa, with a shawl over her back. On the ground was... a bowl of meat and fish! This apartment smelt like the restaurant owner! The cat fell onto the ground and eagerly wolfed down the big bowl and lapped up the saucer of milk. The cat, who had grown underneath the name of Dapplefur, still hadn't come to terms with the sudden change, but had decided that living with the human was much less risky. Dapplefur, now content with living with her human, took to watching the other people. The tortoiseshell could sense everyone inside their homes, but couldn't understand why they didn't come out. Every now and again humans would cross the square that Dapplefur was watching over, and if two humans ever crossed paths, they would walk very far away from each other. Dapplefur assumed that these people didn't like each other. After many months of this going on, her human suddenly left the apartment for much longer than usual, and when she came back she smelt of... the restaurant! So the next day, Dapplefur followed her out, into her human's car and to the restaurant, where she was given fresh fish and meat. It still wasn't the same - there were no tables, fewer customers came and when they did, only to take a white plastic bag full of food. But it was a start back to how things were before, and a start, Dapplefur thought, was better than nothing. Lockdown can affect anyone and everything, things that you can see that visibly struggle and things that silently, invisibly struggle.