The day Raven arrived

I remember the exact texture of the kitchen floor that afternoon. The light coming in low. The carrier on the tile, and inside it, the smallest amount of fur I had ever seen, breathing.

She was so small in the carrier. So small, and so quiet. I sat on the kitchen floor with her for a long time before I even opened the door.

The first hour

The vet had warned me she might not eat for days. He was right about that. He was wrong about a few other things — like the bit where he wasn’t sure she would make it.

I lay flat on my belly that first hour, with my chin on the floor and my hand near the carrier door, and I just talked to her. About nothing at all. About the weather and the radio and what colour the curtains were. She didn’t move.

But after a long, long time, she lifted her head an inch.

That was the entire afternoon. That inch.

What I didn’t know yet

I didn’t know yet that she would learn to trust hands again. I didn’t know she would one day sit on the back of the sofa and watch me cook. I didn’t know she would become the one who comforts the new fosters when they cry their first night.

I didn’t know any of it.

I just sat on the floor with her, in the low afternoon light, and waited.

Looking back, that’s the only thing this work has ever asked of me. To sit on the floor and wait. To be very, very still, until something small and brave decides it’s safe to come closer.

That was the day everything began.