Last Updated on May 20, 2026 by admin
The contractor was renovating a kitchen in a two-bedroom rental in Birmingham when he heard the sound through the wall behind the dishwasher.
He thought it was the dishwasher first. He thought it was a refrigerator coil. He thought it was the plumbing.
It was not the plumbing.
He turned off the power. He turned off the water. He stood very still with one ear against the drywall and listened to two distinct cries — at slightly different pitches — coming from inside the wall.
He cut a six-inch hole in the drywall.
He saw eyes.
Then he called the fire department, because a six-inch hole is enough to see in but not enough to get a kitten out, and the kittens in the wall did not look like they had been there for less than several days.
The Birmingham firefighter who showed up — off-duty, called in by a neighbor who saw the contractor pacing on the sidewalk — was a guy named Mateo whose own cat had died two months earlier.
He brought his own tools. He widened the hole carefully, in stages, so as not to drop drywall on the kittens. The kittens did not run. They had used up the running.
When he pulled them out — one in each hand — they were ash-gray with construction dust and so thin you could feel their hearts.
They were sisters.
He kept both of them.
It is a not-uncommon ending of a not-uncommon story, in a not-uncommon week, in a city most people are not paying attention to.
But it is, also, an ending.
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