"That Damned Cat" by RJ Lippold
That Damned Cat
by RJ Lippold
Every night, my kitchen cabinet doors slam rabidly like caged birds trying to escape a snare. Cups and plates fall like torrential rain, shards like baby teeth lay about the place to cut my feet. The shower curtain was torn from the rings for the third time this week and I don’t have enough iodine to keep up with the scratches and pinholes across my legs and arms. I have not slept in weeks and can no longer take the screeching, the buzzing, the mayhem. The acrid smack of piss on the air. I can’t see the damned thing, but I do know it is that damned cat. Blankenship’s cat! You can take that straight to the bank!
I haven’t been right in a while, not since the mishap in Mrs Blankenship’s driveway. On my postal route through Medford, I’d pulled my jeep up onto the curb in front of her rag tag ranch house, with its knee-high blades of saint Augustine and plumes of sumac, just screaming with hoppers, cicadas and lord knows what else. I gathered my letters for the cul de sac and hoofed my way around to make my deliveries to this neck of the woods.
When I got back to the jeep Blankenship was there, pulling her freshly delivered electric bill from her rusty mailbox. The hatch cried and clicked into a tinny snap. She often lingered at my jeep, I believe that the poor woman is lonely. She’d been on her own as long as I can remember.
“Good news Mrs. B?” I’d made this same terrible joke for the past year and by her expression, I could tell that she looked forward to it.
“I’m on the right side of the ground, aren’t I?” she said. I forced a smile at her words. At our awkward ritual.
“Welp, the mail ain’t going to deliver itself!” I’d hopped in the jeep trying not to make eye contact and slowly pulled off the curb. I’d made small talk with her before and had been roped into lectures about politics and the weather. That I could do without. I’m just not able for it….never again Blankenship.
It was then that I’d felt the unmistakably soft shift of a tire navigating organic matter. Blankenship began screaming with a throat full of locusts. She’d dropped her bill and both hands flickered at either side of her head like panicked antlers. In the passenger side view mirror, I could see the flailing shape of black fur and blood. The cat was scratching for purchase in between this world and the next. I simply hung my head and put her in park.
“No No No No!” Blankenship leaned and scooped the now still cat underneath her cardigan, trying desperately to wake it from death.
I felt absolutely terrible. I tried my best to console Mrs. B. I gently gathered the cat and wrapped it in a plastic bag and buried it in her back yard, near a compost pile. She hummed Fields of Gold by Sting as I finished off the final details of the grave.
“What was its name?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Not a clue, I’d never seen it before” She spoke through a Kleenex as she wiped sad phlegm from her face. “There’s lots of things living in that grass I’ll never know about I reckon.”
“It was a beautiful creature all the same.” I tried to find the least awkward way to pat her hunched back.
“Well…” she sniffled “its your cat now.”
The rest of the shift felt wrong. I had to make up lost time for the makeshift funeral. I kept seeing the face of the cat in the back of my mind. Wet and matted black fur, lime-green eyes staring in different directions but seeing nothing. Soft innards poking from the mouth like a ballooned tongue. I suddenly felt something brush my calves, near the pedals of the jeep. A solid serpentine presence slinking between and against my legs. I reached to slap away the item, expecting a loose water bottle or an old shirt that may have slid out from under the seat. I’d slammed the brakes into a skid, almost rear-ending a sedan in front of me at a light. My face went ashen white and bone-cold. There was nothing at my feet. Nothing under the seat. Not a damned thing. A couple of random flies I hadn’t noticed before traced a dark halo around my head. A honk from the truck behind me snapped me out of it and I pulled through the green light. I just needed to get home and lay down.
Back home around dusk, I tossed my keys up on the kitchen counter, turned on the tv and collapsed onto the sofa. As I drifted in and out of consciousness to sports commentators rattling on about playoffs, I’d swatted away more flies from around my head. Where the hell were they coming from? I figured that I must have the stink of death on me from burying the cat earlier. There definitely seemed to be more of them. I picked up an old shirt from behind the sofa and placed it over my face, laid down and tried to sleep.
You’ve probably already figured me for a nut-job by this point, but as plain as day on this waking Earth I felt something hop onto my chest. I heard a low hum, like the world’s tiniest motorboat and the buzz of flies. I could smell the iron tang of old blood. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. The shirt was drug off my face, I could feel something pulling it. Then it sat on my stomach. I’d opened my eyes. Yes, I was awake! Flies, this time twice as many hovered over my belly, moving like evening swallows. They converged to form what looked to be a cat-sized shape. The flies scattered. Three bloody lines were raked down my face.