Each kitten season we get one or two misfits, ones with tail deformities or blind eyes. This time our year’s end challenge is a homely one; such a bad word but how else to describe something that looks as though it had been made from leftover pieces?

This poor little female is the runt. She and her beautiful orange and white brother, Squiggles, were rescued from the backyard of an elderly woman in Santa Maria.

To start with, the first thing you see is that her left eye is blind. This is quite enough to put most people off from even thinking about adoption. I named her Squint.

Then there is her hair. I can barely describe what color she is because it appears to change, depending on the light. Essentially her coat is black with a few white tuxedo markings; not shiny smooth beautiful black, but dusty, grayish and wispy. In the sun the ends glow a brassy red. Every day is a bad hair day for her.

To make matters worse, her long hair does not completely cover her body but stops just behind her fluffy forelegs and begins again at the ears. This gives her the look of a bobble-head toy with a long skinny neck, very odd when seen from above. The neck has short hair with a few long wisps sticking out. You would swear that she had been shaved and the hair was just growing back, but it doesn’t appear that this has happened.

Now to her face. Besides the blind eye, she has but one long white eyebrow. The other one is short and black, making it appear missing altogether. The whiskers, too, are lopsided being white on one side and black on the other, opposite from the eyebrows.

Her cockeyed looks might be overcome by purrsonality, but she’s not particularly a lap kitty. While she will lie limp on my lap as I give her belly rubs, I have only heard her purr once. That was the day her brother went in for neuter surgery and she was lonely. I know she has it in her to be sweet, given the chance.

Finding a forever home for this little one will be difficult. If she has plucked your heart strings, please call and let us know. She deserves a good life, no matter what she looks like.

Update: On Nov. 6, Squint was spayed and had her left eye removed.