Ginger's Tail:#2. My tail!

“This is my story, my tale. My tail; what happened to that?”
I lost it in an accident when a door slammed shut and I got my tail caught in it at just the wrong moment. I was just coming back home. I'd been having a look around the grass and the trees that surrounded our home. My folks lived on a campus outside the city of Ankara. That's in Turkey, and it's where I was born. Anyway, I'd been looking round for birds and mice, and other cats too. There was nothing much moving this particular afternoon. Robert had come back from school and was having a beer and a smoke on our balcony. It was five o' clock, maybe. Nothing was moving except the wind. Ankara must be one of the windiest places on the planet. It was windy, and so nothing much was moving. Robert was up there, in the wind. Nothing much stops him from sitting on his balcony and having a beer and a smoke of his pipe. It was too windy for me though, so I slipped inside just as the door was slamming with the wind behind it.
There's pain, and then there was what I felt on the day I got my tail broken in two. I let out a yell like it was the end of the world or something. He didn't hear me. I think he had his headphones on, listening to something. He didn't hear me. Nobody heard me. I yelled the building down, but nobody so much as twitched.
I limped in when Nazan, that's Robert's wife, opened the door. She was busy fixing dinner so she didn't pick me up like usual. She didn't notice there was anything wrong with my tail. Nobody did - until later. When they finally saw that it wasn't the normal shape; that it didn't have any life in it, that's when they shouted out.
"Hey, what's up with your tail, Ginger? He's nice and direct like that. Nazan picked me up and stroked my tail.
"Ouch!" That hurt. And that was that. That was the end of my tail. I had it surgically removed, as they say, in a hospital for animals. I missed it a lot at first, but then I got used to it not being there, and I was fine again.

A cat's perspective

A CAT’S PERSPECTIVE
Looking after a cat can be a whole lot of work. It means putting food and water out twice or three times some days. That depends on how I feel. It means letting me out when I want to go out, and letting me back in when I'm ready to come in. It means going out to look for me when you haven't seen or heard me for a while. It means caring for me.
“And in return, what do you get?”
“ Well, you get me, Ginger.”
I'm real nice to stroke and to have brushing past your legs as you wash the dishes. I do things that amuse you; I go missing for an hour, and then when you've all but given up on me, I pop my head out from the bottom of the wardrobe where I've been sleeping. You hear something moving, and look up to see me doing my balancing act on the top of the door. You jump up as if I'm about to leap off a cliff or something, so I leap on you instead and make you fall over and knock your coffee over.
But most of all, I'm just there, somebody, something else. My folks talk to me, but I don't say anything. They tell me their secrets, their hopes and their fears, and I keep them safe.