Kyle Rolinatis is a midwestern horror/comedy author. She is the two-time recipient of the prestigious “Pleasure to Have in Class” award at Prairie Lincoln Elementary School. Kyle spent most of her life with her nose in a Stephen King book, brooding, or writing poetry and short stories. These days you can find Kyle working on her debut horror/comedy novel “Ope!” between crippling bouts of procrastination and her day job in healthcare administration. In her free time Kyle spends time with her family and too many animals in Columbus, Ohio and loves to vacation in coastal Maine. Her debut novel is set to be released in 2024 and if you follow her on Facebook or Instagram she promises to get a website started as soon as a child or teenager shows her how.
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BASTET
by
Kyle Rolinatis
Rina poked a fork into the triple layered chocolate fudge buttercream cake peppered in rainbow sprinkles and bright gel letters that spelled out “Happy 18th Birthday”. She positioned one hand underneath her hand holding the fork to catch the crumbs as she popped a huge scoop into her mouth. Dark brown crumbs landed like snow on the ivory marble counter beneath her. She swiped the crumbs onto the hardwood floors where they would be much harder to see and washed the cake down with a long swig from her ice-cold soda can.
Rina hated waiting. She looked at the clock and it was now 1 pm and she was growing impatient. She walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that served as the back wall of their cliffside home in coastal Maine. The sun was bright in the cloudless sky. Rina watched the old lighthouse with a bright red beacon turning and turning just offshore. In the ocean below she could see boats on the horizon and closer to shore, dozens of heads bobbing around in the water.
This was Rina’s 18th birthday, and her parents were not here. She knew her parents were sorry to miss her birthday, that was apparent when they sent a delivery of 18 dozen pink roses this morning along with the chocolate buttercream cake. They were away on business in Egypt. Rina was and only child and was born here, in Maine. Her parents were Egyptian, but she never wanted to visit Egypt and was not that interested in learning about her culture. Her parents told her she would one day, and she imagined a light switch being flipped on that had been off her whole life. She loosened the elastic tie from her wrist and pulled her thick curly black hair into a ponytail. That’s it, she was leaving. She was supposed to wait for her present to arrive today, but she also had plans to meet her boyfriend, Brady, at York Beach and they would go out for sushi right after. He would be staying with her tonight again, she just had to remember to turn off the exterior cameras, so her parents didn’t see him coming in.
Rina spun around with purpose away from the picturesque scene outside her window and grabbed the towels and the sunscreen off the kitchen island. She picked up her key fob and went to the garage and pulled her car out into the driveway. A FedEx truck pulled right behind her blocking her in. Ah, finally, her gift she thought. She turned off the car and jogged down to the truck to meet the driver who was scanning an item. He handed her a wooden box about the size of a large toaster. She thanked him and went into the garage and into the house and put the box on the counter.
Rina’s phone vibrated and it was Brady asking her when she would be at the beach. She took her phone and turned around and positioned herself for a selfie in front of the box, smiled wide and took a picture. She sent him the picture with the caption “Parents sent gift from Egypt. Opening it and be there right after”. He sent back a text of an eggplant and a heart, and she just rolled her eyes and laughed.
She studied the box trying to figure out how to open it. She grabbed a putty knife smeared with white spackle from the junk drawer and pried off the top of the box. There was a mound of thin, dry straw inside that she moved aside to reveal a perfectly shiny black statue. She grabbed it and carefully lifted it out. An Egyptian black cat. Probably a god or something, she thought. The cat had a large amulet around its neck and was covered in hieroglyphics. She thought she heard something buzzing and placed the statue on the counter. She bent down eye level with the cat and stared at it curiously.
A statue is not what she wanted, but she guessed it would make a decent Instagram story. “Gift from parents from Egypt #catsrule #birthdaygirl” and put up a peace sign placing statue close to her face and took the picture and posted. Immediately she got a reply “cool goddess Bastet statue, Happy Birthday girlie”. Another comment came up “That looks scary as shit. Isn’t this how horror movies start? Lol” Just then she heard buzzing again. She pulled the statue back, looked at it, shook it, and held it up to her ear. Just then she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her head and reflexively threw the statue to the floor. The statue cracked wide open. The shiny black head of the cat rolled slowly into the leg of the kitchen island and came to rest.
BUZZ! BUZZ! It got a much louder and Rina held her aching head and bent down to look at the broken statue just as a cloud of ash exploded into her face. She fell back choking on the ash and watched as a giant dust cloud traveled upward and toward the windows, seeping through the edges. She looked back at the statue as dark locusts began crawling out of the belly of the cat and taking flight around Rina’s house. Locusts moved through the curls in her hair and covered her face and ears. They used their wiry legs to pry open Rina’s lips as she tried in vain to swat them away. They covered the counters, the cake, the roses, and Rina. She heard the glass in her house cracking as a thousand locusts banged against the windows. Outside she could see the cloud of ash that was now billions of bugs filling up the sky. She grabbed at her throat but all she felt was locusts moving. She could no longer breathe as they made their way up her nose and inside her mouth as the world went black.