Free All Fall Down by Annie Reed

All she could
think about was the not-very-nice man's cat and its little kittens,
and how things that died didn't come back.
    The next morning after Missy's parents
started working—her daddy in the room by the front door and her
mommy at the sewing machine in the back—Missy walked around the
little kitchen where they all ate lunch and looked for something
that would be a better tool for making the hole in the fence
bigger. Daddy kept his tools on his workbench, but sometimes when
he was really busy, he left one in the kitchen.
    Like the little hammer he'd left in the
drawer with the forks and spoons.
    Missy couldn't hit the board with the
hammer—that would make too much noise—but she could use the other
side of the hammer. She'd seen her daddy pry out nails using the
back of a hammer. Maybe she could pry out the nails in the board so
she could move it out of the way.
    Which was exactly what she did.
    It took her a long time because she had
never used a hammer before and the nails were really long, but the
board was old and dry and the nails weren't tight anymore.
Eventually she pried out enough nails out that the board hung
loose. Missy pushed and wriggled and squirmed, and she finally made
it through the fence to the other side, no worse for wear than a
couple of little splinters in her back.
    By now the sun was pretty high in the sky.
Soon Mommy would be calling Missy in for lunch. Missy needed to
find a quick way into the garage to look at the kittens and then
wriggle back through the hole in the fence, all before lunch.
    Missy thought it must be her lucky day. The
back door to the garage wasn't locked. Only when she pushed the
door open, it made a rusty, creaking sound, and the bottom of the
door scraped against the concrete floor of the garage. Missy held
her breath, waiting to see if the not-so-nice man had heard the
door open, but no one came out to yell at her.
    The inside of the garage
was packed full of stuff. Missy had never seen so many boxes in her
life. Stacks and stacks of boxes, all marked with numbers on the
sides. Missy couldn't read her numbers yet except for two, four,
and eight, the numbers on the television dial for the shows she
liked to watch. She saw a couple of twos and fours on the boxes,
but most of the numbers weren't her television numbers. Mommy said
Missy would learn numbers when she went to first grade after summer
was over. She wished she knew her numbers now because maybe then
she'd understand why being inside the garage with all these boxes
was making her scared. More scared than she'd ever been of
anything, even the evil witch and her flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz . The garage
smelled damp and dirty, like something rotten was hidden in all
those boxes. The broken window where the momma cat had come inside
was high up on the wall and the glass was dirty, so not much light
got inside.
    Missy didn't want to stay in this dark,
scary garage, not one minute more.
    Then she heard the kittens cry.
    Teeny, tiny meows, like they were as scared
as Missy.
    Why would their momma leave them alone in a
place like this? Missy hadn't seen the pretty momma cat at all that
morning. She thought she'd find her in here with her kittens, maybe
in a basket with a blanket, but there was no basket that Missy
could see. Only piles of junk and stacks and stacks of boxes.
    What if a lid had fallen down on one of the
boxes and the momma cat was stuck inside with her kittens? What if
Missy was the only one who could save them all?
    Missy followed the sound of the kittens'
cries. She had to climb over a stack of old magazines and around a
pile of canvas-covered metal poles before she found a box with a
hole chewed out of one side near the top. Missy stood up on her
tip-toes and listened. The meows were coming from inside!
    Without warning, a door on the other side of
the garage banged open.
    Missy nearly fell off her tip-toes. She
grabbed onto the cardboard box with the kittens inside just to keep
her