Last Updated on June 1, 2026 by admin
Friday, February 13, 2026. A small apartment on Pond Street in Woonsocket, Rhode Island — 1,200 square feet, second floor, single bathroom — opened its door to the Rhode Island SPCA.
By the end of the day, ninety-seven cats had been removed.
The first one out of the bathroom was a dilute calico with a torn left ear and a missing canine. The intake sheet at the RISPCA on Concord Street that night logged her as INTAKE #1 / EST 5 YR / DILUTE CALICO / NAME: POMEGRANATE.
The name was assigned by a foster coordinator named Lila Hawthorne, who said later that she had been thinking about a poem she had read in college about a pomegranate seed, and the cat had a small mark on her shoulder that looked like a seed, and the name fit. “I needed to name her something specific,” Lila said. “Ninety-seven cats and you go in your head from numbers to names or you go home and you can’t sleep.”
The owner of the apartment had called RISPCA herself. She had been overwhelmed. She had stopped counting after the fourth litter in eighteen months. She had not, by every account, been cruel. She had been buried. When the volunteers arrived, she opened the door. She did not argue. She helped carry the carriers down the stairs.
The cats were undersocialized. Most were healthy. Some had upper-respiratory infections. Five were pregnant. None had been microchipped. None had been to a veterinarian in two years.
The RISPCA’s own building filled to capacity by 9 p.m. The Providence Animal Rescue League took twenty-two cats. East Greenwich Animal Protection League took fifteen. A coalition of foster homes across Bristol and Pawtucket absorbed the rest within the weekend.
Pomegranate went to a foster on the East Side of Providence — a man named Wendell Holcombe, who is sixty-eight, retired from the postal service, and had been a foster volunteer for the RISPCA for three years. He had agreed to take one cat. He had a small bedroom with no carpet and a window that looked into a maple tree.
The first night, Pomegranate stayed in the carrier. The second night, she came out as far as the carrier door. The third night, she walked to the window and looked at the maple tree for two hours.
By the end of February, fifty-five of the ninety-seven cats had been placed in fosters or transferred to other shelters. By the end of March, eighty had been placed. By April 14, all ninety-seven had been moved out of intake — some adopted, most still in foster or shelter care, none still in the original apartment.
Pomegranate is, as of this morning, still with Wendell Holcombe in Providence. She has been there nineteen weeks. She has not been adopted. Wendell has not been very actively trying to get her adopted.
“I told them I’d take one,” Wendell said on Saturday afternoon. “The papers got filled out. They got moved into the wrong drawer. I think I’m going to leave them where they are.”
The dilute calico is on the maple-tree windowsill at the moment of writing. The window is open four inches. There is a screen.
The torn left ear catches the wind.
She does not flinch.
The first one out of the bathroom got her name from a poem nobody can remember, in a coat that catches the light, in a house that did not start out as hers and has, very quietly, become so.