In Memory of Yzma 10/3/2021 – 12/14/2025
Yzma’s story at Shadow Cats started on a Thursday. Our Director received an email from Austin Animal Services regarding an alleged feline leukemia-positive Persian. Her coat was severely matted, the beautiful silver shimmer to her white fur dulled by time and dirt. Her big, round eyes were accented not by a natural eyeliner, but by a teary discharge. She tucked her body in the back of the kennel, and though she was sweet as could be, it was apparent that she hadn’t known a loving touch in some time.
We drove to her that very same day, and as she was taken to the car in her carrier, looking out at the world around her through its dappled sunlight, we promised her a new life. She warmed to us quickly, quickly enough that the protective meekness she cloaked herself in was shed to reveal the queenly raiment beneath. We pampered her as royalty deserves, bathing, cleaning, and dematting her.
We were shocked by how thin she was beneath all of the matted clumps.
We stood in the kitchen then, rapid-fire suggesting fitting names for the unexpected beauty that had landed in our laps. So many were suggested, but none seemed to match her personality or spirit. Anna, one of our cat care technicians, suggested Yzma. Originally, this was because Yzma (the main antagonist of Emperor’s New Groove) at one point turned into a fluffy white cat. We didn’t realize at the time just how much Yzma would live up to the sassiness of her namesake.
We also didn’t realize that, despite a positive feline leukemia SNAP test, Yzma would later test negative on a repeat SNAP as well as IDEXX’s quantitative PCR. Yzma was free to join the ranks of Oasis! She didn’t care for her roommates. Not in a negative way, she just…truly didn’t care. She was independent. She had her own itinerary for the day, rotating in the famed Christmas present cat bed, the cat TV viewing beds, and eventually her very own hidey hole that smelled of “Street Cat Eau Fraîche.” Said lovingly, of course! You can take the cat out of the streets, but you can’t always take the streets out of the cat, even with a rigid grooming regimen.
Adoring admirers would come in droves to watch Yzma give them judgmental side-eyes. It was her charm, the sort of bred expectancy that knew she was beautiful without trying, and came to expect long lines of hopeful parents carrying babies she was expected to christen with a forehead lick. This was just the life of Yzma. Tiring, really. She’d put in her paces for about five minutes before luxuriating in front of her regularly scheduled bird-watching that she couldn’t actually be bothered to watch.
One thing Yzma got excited about was playtime, though. Despite her tiny body, often adorned in the warmest and prettiest of sweaters (or else), she could move with a quickness when the wand toys came out with such vigor that our resident playtime lunatic, Dottie, was even put to shame. Yzma played. She scaled shelves she wasn’t supposed to be on. She ate wet food akin to the Beast in Beauty and the Beast eating porridge and getting at least 75% of it on his face. She plotted our downfall quietly from the confinement of the nebulization tank and made medication time more like an obstacle course than a medical treatment.
She gained weight. Her fur grew out and shimmered. Her eyes cleared. Yzma was happy. She was living life on her terms, the way she was always meant to, but had been denied for so long. Her labwork improved. Yzma was gearing up to look at a handful of adopters expectantly, and with a flourish of her tail that we grew to love so much.
But her body had other plans. So often, the downfall of breeding is detrimental defects that can lie dormant for a long time. Her heart had no murmurs, no signs of any issues, but she stumbled one day. She had a shockingly high fever and labored breathing. We rushed her to the vet, where they immediately took radiographs. There was scant fluid in her chest, and abnormal bronchial patterns. We thought, hoped, it was treatable. We began treatment immediately, but by the following day, it became clearer that Yzma’s heart, the one we had fallen in love with, was failing. Her chest was filling with fluid quickly, and her time was short.
We were in shock. We had been ready for Yzma to start the rest of her life, not to have her succumb to its end so soon. We tearfully bolstered ourselves with the knowledge that, despite our short time with her, she had lived twenty lives in those months. Yzma, the cat tucked into the back of the cage with teary eyes and a dull coat, had learned to thrive, had learned what safety was… What love was.
But we know its cost dearly, and it’s one we will choose every time, because Yzma mattered even in the absence of a long life. Because in that short time, she’d impacted us beautifully. Held in loving arms, praised, kissed, and petted, Yzma gently, swiftly, went to sleep, surrounded by the love she hadn’t known…but grew into. The love that made her flourish.
We don’t know who stands at life’s crossing for her, the bonds she may have made in a life before the warmth of Shadow Cats. But we know at that last step of the fluorescing bridge, dappled in the same sunlight that glimmered through her carrier on the day we met, Yzma is greeted by the droves of Shadow Cats who came before her. Some with long lives, some with short, but all lived with purpose, with grace, with decency. Her pristine white paws pad through the grass. There are butterflies flitting through the tall grass, little critters hunkered low in playful chase. Yzma can do what she loved. She can play, she can recline, she can find nature’s own heated bed like the one she loved so much on Oasis’ catio, to soak in the sun.
Thank you to Yzma’s wonderful sponsor, Christopher D. Thank you to the wonderful volunteers who made sure to tire our queen regent out with as many ribbon toys as she wished to play with. Thank you to the staff who nursed our sassy girl to health and who gave her the safe space to exist truly as herself. Thank you to anyone who ever looked at Yzma and thought, “I HAVE to have that cat!” We know, it was a daily inner debate.
We love you, Yzma. We always will.
Yzma had 1 Sponsor
Christopher Diamond