On Friday Greta woke up a little sick. Her eyes were sad and her ears flat. She curled up in the drawer I’d prepared for her kittens and didn’t move from there except to use the litter box. I did the math: it was still about three weeks until she was due, so that couldn’t have been the reason for her lack of energy. She wasn’t better by evening so I decided to bring her to the vet. I hadn’t done so earlier out of disdain for the man I could see as nothing but an animal sterilizer. It was past six o’clock. The vet was going to close in forty minutes so I called a taxi and put Greta in her cage as fast as possible. It was essentially a fool’s errand; the place was a few miles from my apartment and anyone who knows Friday rush-hour traffic in this deranged city would have given up. But I needed to know that Greta was all right. I grabbed her cage, she, mewing the whole time in protest at being taken from the apartment, and ran down the stairs not thinking about the risks, not even about the steps, which were against me that day. I tripped on one of them and bounced on my hips a few times. As I fell, I took Greta’s cage in both hands so it wouldn’t crash to the ground. It was a scare but the accident had no further consequences. I was fine. Despite my prediction, we made it to the veterinarian just before they closed the clinic. After giving her a physical examination and listening to her heart, the doctor congratulated us both; mother and kittens were doing marvelously. The only thing ailing Greta was an extreme, though normal, exhaustion.