the beast

For Jenny, the other night was the same as every Saturday night. Quiet. She did all her usual Saturday night activities, which sadly just include popping popcorn and eating it while reading a book. Nothing too out of the ordinary. She got ready for bed and just as she sat down on her bed, she heard the most unsettling noise coming from inside her house.

Meeeeoooow.

Not being a cat-loving person or owning one of her own, Jenny bolted into action. She raced out of her room, threw on her plastic house slippers and grabbed what she thought would be her best defense against this intruder. The broom. She quickly raced out the front door and into the hallway, rapping the broom against the walls.

Meeeeoooow.

This time it came from the stairway. She flicked on the light switch and sprinted up the stairs, still rapping the broom against the walls. As she made her ascent to the roof, she heard its cry once more from above. It sounded like a very old, dejected cat. When she placed her first step onto the roof, fear caught in her throat as she finally laid her eyes upon the beast. Obese and filthy, its haunted eyes looked directly at Jenny.

Both beast and woman recognized one another from their initial stumble upon earlier in the week. (On that particular morning, the beast had startled Jenny as she had hung her clothes. Both terrified of each other, the beast jumped from the roof onto a neighbor’s window and departed.) As they stared into each other’s eyes, cat and human were stuck in some kind of inter-species face-off.

Finally, breaking from the cat’s eerie hold on her, Jenny ever-so-slowly glanced down towards the cat’s paws and saw it. The dead cat head. Ever since moving into her house, Jenny had been working up the nerve to dispose of the disgusting vestiges of this cat skull. Its skeleton had long since departed, but somehow only its old lifeless cranium remained. Attempts had been made at removing it, but each time some odd occurrence would unfold. The first attempt Jenny was unable to locate the skull. The wind seemed to blow it all over the rooftop and sometimes, the skull would be missing for days at a time. And for this reason, Jenny feared the skull and chose to ignore it from that day on.

However, it seemed the beast had other plans for its fellow deceased feline friend. Scooping the skull into its jaws, the beast took one last look at Jenny with its yellow eyes and jumped from the roof onto an old television antenna and scaled its way up to the adjacent roof. Then with a flick of its, tail, the beast departed into the night.

Still clutching her broom, Jenny took a deep breath, closed the door to the roof and headed off to bed. Exhausted from this freak encounter, she quickly fell to sleep.

Days later, Jenny once again made her way up the stairs with a load of wet clothes ready to be dried. With her arms full, she struggled to open the door without dropping any of the clothing. Making her way over to the clothesline, Jenny tripped but kept walking and turned her head around to get a look at what had caused her to trip. Probably a clothespin. Panic jolted her as she looked down and saw it: the dead cat head.

It had returned.