a may ghost story
red in tooth and claw
The first time Jen heard the cat, she was in the bathtub. The meow was plaintive and unmistakable. She put down her glass of wine and listened, but it did not meow again.
She did not have a cat. She had no sort of pet at all, never had, not even as a child. Her neighbors did not have cats. In her garden-level apartment, perhaps one might have thought the cat was outside on the street; but there was no window in the bathroom, no wall shared with the outside, such that passing cat could have made the sound. There was—in short—no possibility of a cat that day, or any other day. Nonetheless, she knew what she’d heard. It had been a cat.
If she’d told this story to her mother, her mother would have said: wasn’t it a pipe? These old buildings.… And maybe for her, it would have been a pipe. But one thing Jen would have said, in that conversation, if she’d been having it, which of course she was not, was that her building was not old. It was new construction. No old meowing pipes here. She could even hear her mother’s reply: maybe it’s settling down? These new buildings.… The answer would have become a pipe, through sheer force of her will.
But she was not here, and it was not a pipe.
The cat did not meow again that night. After her bath and her wine, Jen went to sleep. She dreamed she was trying to swim laps, but that every time she got halfway across the pool, its length doubled. “You’ll never get to the end going that way,” said a tortoise on the sidelines. “You’ve got to try something else.” On either side of the pool, silent, rows and rows of identical calico cats watched her as she continued to swim and, exhausted by her efforts, began to sink beneath the water.
The second time Jen heard the cat, she was not alone. A friend from college, Madison, was over. They had made plans to go to happy hour weeks ago and when the date arrived, Jen was without excuses. The bar Madison had picked out was too expensive, too dark, and too loud. The cocktail menu featured baroque and disgusting concoctions whose names Jen would have been embarrassed to say out loud. She had gotten a martini and picked at a cheese plate. Madison had, unasked, walked her home, then popped into the bathroom.
When she eventually emerged, she was rubbing her wet hands on her slacks—a filthy habit that no number of attractively placed and obvious towels seemed able to cure. Watching her friend wipe her hands off on her thighs, the dark streaks of water on the khaki material announcing to the world “I’m unable to learn basic civilized behavior,” Jen thought, with abrupt but unquestionable certainty: I’ve always hated you. Madison fit. Madison could wipe her hands on her pants, and it was acceptable, it was fine, nobody cared. But no matter how many towels of appropriate shapes and sizes Jen acquired, no matter how tastefully personality-free her beige furniture, no matter how unobjectionable her martinis, she did not fit. With the clarity of hatred she saw that it had been this way her whole life, that she had always been the unconvincing cuckoo’s egg nestled among the accepted human beings, even though she’d never done anything wrong. Jen felt dizzy with spite. I could kill you.
“Jen,” said Madison, hesitantly.
There it was.
“I know it’s been hard.”
“It’s not that hard to have a dead mom,” said Jen. “It’s no effort at all really. I didn’t even do anything. I didn’t even kill her.” And then she smashed her first into Madison’s idiot pale moon face, right between her big cow eyes, and when she went down Jen kicked her, over and over, right in the face, heard the bone crunch—
Actually, what Jen said was: “One day at a time, right?”
“Yes,” said Madison, clinging gratefully to the cliche. “But you know, you should be willing to ask for more help. I mean, I’m always happy to listen. Or, I mean, happy is the wrong word. But you know, those of us from school, we really care about you—”
“You’re a good friend,” said Jen, imagining slicing off Madison’s fingers knuckle by knuckle. That was when she heard the cat again. She studied her friend’s face. Quite clearly, she had heard nothing.
Jen began to grasp the situation.
“Well,” said Madison, “see you later.” Jen went with her to the door and saw her out. Once she was quite sure Madison was gone for the evening and would not be coming back, she went back to where she had been standing and crouched on the floor. “You can come out,” she said. “You’re allowed here. I want you here. I mean, I’m not allowed a pet, but you’re your own cat, right?” She reached out a hand. For a minute or two, there was just her hand, wavering in the empty space and the still air. Then she felt it: the delicate touch of a whiskery nothing, a flush of warmth as nothing sniffed her hand one, two, three times.
When she went to sleep, Jen had no dreams.
The ghost cat had demands. For instance: a ghost cat needs ghost food. The contents of an empty milk bottle poured into a saucer, for instance, worked well. But to become ghost food, she had to eat it herself first. Dumping the contents of a can of tuna in the trash and then scraping the air into the bowl did nothing. She developed a habit of simply setting her plate on the floor every evening, once she was finished. Since the cat was, after all, a ghost, she didn’t need to be too careful about what it ate.
The cat nevertheless had its preferences, and somehow she could tell, when she picked up the plate, the quality of its emptiness. It liked liver and chicken and tuna. It disliked oatmeal and peas. Jen’s diet grew more carnivorous. The feeling of the cat, well-fed and sleek, lolling about in satisfaction, grew with every chicken breast. In fact, the cat was getting bigger. When she had first felt it, it had been very small—a ghost kitten. Now it was a nice-sized cat. Jen grew leaner, more muscular.
Though she’d been drinking the first two times she heard the cat, Jen found that alcohol wasn’t necessary. It helped, yes. If she got very, very drunk, she could even see a shimmer, like heat above asphalt. But usually just a glass of wine was all she need to hear it walking about and on some days she didn’t even need that.
Jen knew that the ghost cat did not mean anything. That was why she never let on about it. Well, there was no point in letting on about a ghost, but if she’d even dropped hints about having a cat or feeding a stray cat or thinking about the general concept of cats, she would have seen a look of pity creep into the face of Madison or her coworkers or whoever else. Oh, your dead mom, they’d be thinking. Your dead mom. You have something to love, to help you move on. Good for you.
Jen hadn’t even liked her mother, who now lived on only as a permanent antagonist within her own mind. Their contact, after she had moved out, had been minimal. It was her mother perhaps who first understood there was something about her daughter that meant she’d never really make an acceptable human being, and even if she was right, Jen still resented it. Nevertheless there had never been anything wrong, exactly, about their conversations; she hadn’t been given the glamor of a cruel mother. They had just been two adults who didn’t like each other.
And after her mother had died, Jen had initially found the pity of others a useful tool for being left alone, but it didn’t work anymore. Now pity made people want to intrude on every moment of your life. They tried to get you to leave the house. They tried to set you up. They tried to plan “activities.” She imagined tricking all the people in her life into thinking they were supposed to go to a party, locking them all in a room, and setting it on fire.
But then, she thought to herself, she’d just be poor Jen with the dead mom and the friends that all died in that fire. It wasn’t a solution.
Her mother would have mocked the whole idea of a ghost cat. “Do you think I came back as a cat?” she would have said. “It’s the pipes.” The cat wasn’t her mother. The cat was a cat. But you couldn’t expect people to understand that this was a totally unrelated ghost. They wanted connections. People always thought they knew how you were feeling and they thought they knew what you needed. People did not leave you alone. They thought if your mother died you should be sad. They thought if you weren’t you were in denial. They thought if you heard things, it was pipes.
It was around that time that mice, attracted by the dirty dishes she left on the floor every night, began showing up in the apartment. She set traps, which killed a couple, but the rest were too smart to fall for it. “Can’t you catch these things?” she asked the ghost cat, pointlessly. She knew answer: they weren’t ghost mice. They wouldn’t become ghost mice even if she snapped a thousand little mice spines in traps. Those mice, dumped in the trash, would simply be like tuna cans scraped into the garbage.
She could feel the ghost cat padding around her, restless, irritated at its inability to torture the mice, irritated at the way the mice didn’t even know to be afraid. She imagined a mouse afterlife as an unkillable ghost, hunted and caught and hunted again. Hell for a mouse. Heaven for a cat.
The bleeding heart vegan at work had lots of tips on how to catch mice alive. The bleeding heart vegan, who didn’t know that Jen’s diet at this point was mostly liver, cheerfully recommended strategies and explained that you had to take the mice pretty far away if you didn’t want them to come back. “Of course” (said the bleeding heart vegan) “the most important thing to figure out how they’re getting in.…”
“Of course,” said Jen. The bleeding heart vegan, who had always thought of her as an uninteresting person, someone who seemed to live only at work and no other context, who had in fact coined the nickname “JenBot” for her behind her back and hadn’t been too careful to keep her from knowing, wondered if he’d gotten her wrong. He did not think she was too squeamish to kill a mouse and that meant she was acting out of some other, higher, motive.
He was right, on both counts. When she caught a mouse, alive, two days later, she pulled it out of the humane trap and looked in what she knew to be the ghost cat’s direction. “Don’t expect me to make a habit of this,” she said, and bit down. Not squeamish at all. The bleeding heart vegan had always been a good judge of people, really, though naturally he never found out about why she wanted the traps. Instead, this single flicker of personality never manifested again, and he forgot about it.
Jen dreamed she was sitting on the edge of a pool. She was watching a woman drown. Somebody she knew once, maybe. She said, if you can’t swim, you deserve to sink, and the woman turned to look at her, but Jen didn’t recognize her face. It didn’t even seem like the face of a real person.
After she started eating the mice, Jen stopped drinking. Now she could see the shimmer of the cat quite easily, all the time. She started coming to work late. Then she stopped coming. They told her that they knew it was grief and that they understood but they said they simply couldn’t use such an erratic employee. If she couldn’t come in they would have to let her go. They were right, they couldn’t use her, but they didn’t understand anything or know anything.
Jen watched as the automatic rent and bill withdrawals brought her bank account down. She no longer cooked the liver she brought home. She felt the cat grow and grow. Her bank account was overdrawn. She ate more liver.
When Madison texted to see how she was doing, Jen asked her over. Of course, Madison knew exactly “how she was doing,” she would have heard Jen got fired, but that was all right. Don’t worry about bringing anything, Jen texted. I’m on a diet.
“Hi Jen,” said Madison, stupid annoying Madison, when she came to the door. The expression on her face was priceless. For a moment Jen saw everything through Madison’s eyes: saw the thin, hollow-cheeked, big-eyed woman in clothes sliding off her body, saw the filthy apartment with its weird smell and the bloodstains. Oh, but Madison still came in, just like Jen knew she would. No, Madison would never do something that would cause her to feel like somebody’s less than perfect number one friend. Just as Jen was trapped by the law of being Jen, by her basic wrongness, so Madison was trapped by the law of being Madison.
“So,” said Madison.
Jen locked the door and switched off the lights.
“Madison,” she said. “Madison, I can see you. I can see in the dark.”
“Jen,” said Madison, who was—even Jen had to admit this—displaying an admirable amount of control over herself. “Jen, are you okay?”
“Honestly?” said Jen. “I’ve never been better.”
She watched Madison back away, down the hall, feeling along the wall for a light switch. Jen had ripped out all the light switches and the light bulbs except for the necessary one in the front hall, and eventually, she knew, Madison’s hand would encounter the hole in the wall where a switch should be. And then, after that, Madison would start screaming, and it was an apartment building, so that would be a problem. It would ruin the whole thing.
So the timing, Jen thought, padding along after her, the timing was very important.
In fact, Madison made it all the way down the hall into the living room before she gave up on trying to find a light and reached into her pocket to get her phone flashlight. Once again, Jen felt she had underestimated Madison, because she certainly hadn’t expected her to have that presence of mind. When the phone light went on, Madison saw two eyes reflected back at her; her mouth began to open wide, wide, wide, and that was when Jen bit into her throat.
It didn’t take her long at all to die after that.
Jen ate her fill; she licked her chops. She flexed her claws and swished her beautiful tail. Looking into a mirror, she saw herself, a magnificent animal, as big as a tiger and as sleek as a house cat. She went into her bedroom and slowly, methodically, used her new claws to destroy everything the woman who had lived here had worn and used. She went into the bathroom and shredded each towel, back into the living room to pee on the beige furniture. Once nothing was left of that stranger’s life, she broke open a window, crawled through, and walked, proud, into the velvet indifference of the night.