This happened in a time period significantly later than the previous story. It was a weekday morning, and my parents were just one breakfast away from going to work. I was out in the yard enjoying the refreshing morning air when suddenly I noticed a kitten creeping under my mother’s Mazda Astina, a car that my mother has had for more than 15 years now. Curious, I checked under the car and found that a maternal cat had moved her litter into an open yet dangerous compartment within the bottom of the car, which was directly under the engine. I lay down and tried to coax the kittens out of the hole, but they were afraid of me – they would jump back up into the hole as soon as they saw my hand desperately trying to reach for them.

Then I saw my parents come out of the front door with their car keys, and they were about to drive off to work. I couldn’t even imagine what would happen to the kittens if my mother were to turn on the engine. I tried to warn them that there were kittens hiding under mother’s car, but they just wouldn’t listen – I was, afterall, a small child with a wild imagination. My late grandmother was in the house that day, and she came out when she heard the commotion outside. Gently, she assured me that there were no kittens under the car, but I knew better. I was powerless as I saw my mother getting into the driver seat of her car and turned on the ignition. Her engine roared, but I didn’t hear any meowing – perhaps the kittens had realized the danger and came out just in time. For a moment, I felt relieved.

When my mother tried to back the car out of the driveway, it was then when everyone heard a high-pitched squeak, and my eyes shifted quickly at the car tires. One of the kittens didn’t crawl out from under the the car in time and had his cute little paw run down by one of the huge tires. The kitten limped away, obviously in pain, and I was screaming and crying, at the same time scolding my elders for not listening to me in the first place.

The poor kitten survived the ordeal, but his right paw was permanently crippled, and it had to limp around for the rest of its life. It stayed with us for about a year or two, and the kitten grew up to be a cute little cat until the day it ran away. I never saw it again.