We didn’t really want the cat, but we took it in. The thing was persistent; there was nothing we could do.
My wife and I, after finding ourselves on the losing end of three real estate bidding wars the previous month, had bought a townhouse down the road from her parents. They’re Greek. It all makes sense.
The place was perfect – not a ton of work needed, not a cavernous place we’d need to fill with couches and chairs we’d never sit on.
Almost everything was moved in by our first night in the new place.
That’s when we heard the scratching at the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard. My wife sleeps soundly – a bowling ball crashing through that glass wouldn’t have made her stir – so, of course, it was me who heard the terrible sound. I ignored it the first couple times, hoping it was among the weird sounds houses make – the ones everyone gets used to after a while.
The third time though, I had to check. I was on the verge of utter terror, so I grabbed the two iron I put under the bed in case I had to fend off an intruder or hit a lengthy golf shot off our hardwood. You just never know.
I held the two iron in the middle of the shaft. This, I hoped, would give me some level of accuracy when I went to plant the iron’s straight edge into someone’s forehead.
The scratching continued. Holding my breath and ready and willing to commit the first true act of violence in my life, I yanked back the curtains and raised my murderous two iron like an axe.
There stood a black cat, on its hind legs, its front paws planted against the glass. It looked at me longingly with neon green eyes. Its fur blended so perfectly with the night that the green circles dissected by black slits were all I could see.
I bent down and touched my hand against the glass door. Searching for the black cat’s eyes, I saw the creature staring, unblinking, at something behind me.
I tapped on the glass, and an instant after its gaze focused on me, it went back to glaring beyond me, somewhere in my living room. Nothing was there, thank god, for I had set my two iron down, and was inexplicably unarmed.
“Sorry, buddy,” I said, and closed the curtain.
The terrible screeching woke me up twice more that night. I hated that cat.
It continued the next night, reaching such a volume as to wake my slightly narcoleptic wife from her slumber. We both came down that night, me with my two iron, her with a gigantic glass candle holder.
Again, the black cat sat there, its paws resting against the door, its eyes begging to come in. It made brief eye contact with me, then my wife, then, like the night before, it stared past us. A wall was all that stood there. My wife closed the curtains.
When the piercing screams of claws moving down the glass broke my sleep on the third night, I shook my wife awake.
“We’ve gotta do something,” I whispered. Groggy, she turned over and told me to let the thing in. I didn’t hate cats, and I’d do anything for some uninterrupted sleep, so I followed Sleeping Beauty’s orders.
The cat, green eyes blazing in the black night, waltzed in like it owned the place. It was trotting toward the couch before I could finish sliding the door open. The creature stopped, sat on its haunches and looked up at nothing in particular. I looked for some flying insect and saw none. The cat, which had a tiny dot of white on its chest interrupting its black coat, blinked a few times, then jumped on the couch, curled up and closed its eyes.
The weird stuff started the next morning.
Sitting at the top of the stairs, almost tripping me on my walk to the bathroom, was a blanket from the living room couch. It had been twisted – twirled around and around until the orange blanket was in a spiral of sorts. The cat lay a few feet away. It looked at me between long blinks.
The twisted and twirled blankets continued. It got worse, actually. The little furry beast, which we called Cat or Mr. Cat, had somehow pried open a basket full of blankets on its second night in the house. They were everywhere; on the stairs, in the bathroom, in the kitchen. I found one a day later in the downstairs bathroom, half of it soaking in the toilet.
We found the cat – Mr. Cat – sprawled out across my wife’s favorite blanket: a fuzzy blue one loved, apparently, by humans and felines alike. It too was twisted almost from top to bottom.
We put the blankets back in their basket to the side of the living room couch and sealed it with three wedding albums containing approximately five million photographs. My wife even made sure the basket’s little silver clasp was secure.
That didn’t stop our furry house guest. The next morning, next to the wicker blanket basket sat our wedding albums, neatly stacked as they had been on top of the basket. The basket lay wide open. Twirled blankets were scattered across the floor.
We didn’t notice it when we first stumbled out of bed and made our ways to our respective showers, but there, just a couple feet beyond the foot of our bed, sat a red-and-white striped blanket, twisted up like the rest. Neither of us recognized it or acknowledged that our bedroom door had been closed that night.
“There was a blanket in our room this morning,” my wife said over dinner that night.
“I know,” I said, staring into my spaghetti. The conversation ended.
My wife and I, after eleven nights in our townhouse, are packing up and moving tomorrow morning. We’re going to live with her parents, a few hundred steps away.
We had stacked a few boxes of Halloween and Christmas decorations in the attic, and when we made the call to skedaddle, I marched up the attic ladder to retrieve the holiday stuff. I fumbled around with the Christmas box and spilled tree ornaments across half the attic floor.
It was there, as I picked up a sunglasses-wearing Santa Clause holding a putter, that I came upon a yellowed box. Its lid was half open, so I slid it off and discovered a jumble of old photos.
I wiped the dust from the Polaroid snapshots and examined them: A long-haired woman posing next to her big new car, a bearded man flipping burgers on the grill, a little girl with ribbons in her hair peddling a tricycle.
The breath caught in my throat when I blew the dust off the last photo. It showed a little boy with sandy-blonde hair wearing red footie pajamas, sitting on a chair in the living room. Our living room.
The boy held a red-and-white striped blanket, twisted and contorted from its very top to its very bottom.
Next to the chair sat a green-eyed black cat with a spot of white on its chest.
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©2011 C.D. Carter
