The addicted kittens Oxy and Contin
Chapter 1: Oxy and Contin
The pair of black and white kittens were born under the sagging front porch of a ramshackle house in a chronically depressed neighborhood in a politically corrupt, drug-ridden Ohio River city that achieved national notoriety as the “Oxycontin Capital of America.” Oxycontin, the brand name for a time release variety of oxycodone, is distributed by the river city’s six pill mills, which do a brisk business serving the needs of the many unemployed addicts and public assistance recipients in the community; and it is distributed to the legal and business professionals by a drug dealing pimp who recruits teenage girls as prostitutes by getting them hooked on the drug.
Almost every family in the city has a son, a daughter or a relative whose life has been touched tragically by Oxycontin. The son of the mayor is an addict, the son of the police chief is an addict, the son of a judge is an addict, and so is the daughter of a bail bondsman. The sons and daughters of teachers and preachers; social workers and city shirkers; bikers and hikers; rich and poor; white and black; Catholic, Protestant, and Jew—all have been scarred by Oxycontin, which the addicts pulverize before ingesting to deactivate the time release feature and hasten the drug’s narcotic kick.
Months before they were born, the alley cat mother of the kittens had become addicted as a result of the antics of two high school dropouts who fed her OxyContin laced sardines for laughs and then posted a video of her bizarre behavior on YouTube, which went viral. They also posted photos of her on Facebook where the “Oxycontin Cat” gained more friends than a Quaker convention.
Like one out of ten babies born in the local hospital, the two kittens were already addicted to Oxycontin at birth. Even before they could see, they were getting their Oxycontin fix through their mother’s milk. A crisis arose before they were a month old when their mother, as programmed by nature, began to wean them. The kittens could not understand why she was withholding their fix, and they grew agitated, but kittens must switch from a liquid to a solid food diet because as adults cats become lactose intolerant. But the addicted kittens never became Oxycontin intolerant.
The kittens were orphaned on a cold New Year's eve, in their fourth week of life when their hallucinating mother was splattered by a car as she dashed across the street to catch an imaginary mouse that she intended to bring back to the kittens under the porch to start them on a solid food diet. Her feline corpse lay splattered on the street like a ten-topping Domino’s pizza dropped from the Tower of Pisa. The dropouts next door to the ramshackle house adopted the two orphaned kittens, naming the male with the black nose, Oxy, and his sister with the black eye, Contin. But the dropouts moved out and the kittens were left to fend for themselves.
Late at night, if you see a cat with a black nose or a black eye, you may be seeing Oxy or Contin. A normal cat’s sense of smell is fourteen times more acute than a human’s, but an Oxycontined cat’s sense of smell is so far beyond the range of human comprehension that a number cannot convey the qualitative difference between their chemically enhanced sense of smell and the attenuated sense of smell that homo sapiens developed once they stood up and stopped sniffing around like dogs.
If you do catch sight of Oxy or Contin, you can be fiarly sure that somewhere not too far away is a cache of Oxycontin, or even a single pill. There's a legend, which is hard to believe, that on their first New Year’s Eve, Oxy and Contin, with their nose for Oxycontin, went from pill mill to pill mill in River City caterwauling like two lost souls in hell. For addicted cats and humans, that’s what life is like in the Capital of Oxycontin—hell. In River City, neither kittens or kids are safe from the scourge of narcotics, and you never know whose son or daughter will fall victim. If Christ had been born in the Capital of Oxycontin in the United States of Addiction, instead of Bethlehem, even he might have ended up an addict, and the Sone of God might have said, "Cursed are the addicted for they never shall see the kingdom of heaven."
