Up until now I haven’t seen one dead thing, not one strange thing, nothing bad happened but failing a chemistry midterm and passing the retake, nothing scary except college applications and lying on my boring essay. I bet if I’d written the essay about this dead cat, Harvard might at least want to interview me.
Aidan’s against me trying not to cry. I’m trying not to scream.
The dead cat says again, “Hey, kid.”
I know it’s the cat talking. Don’t ask me how I know it’s this dead cat flopped up against the side of the road that’s talking. I just do, I know it’s the cat, so I’m trying not to scream while Aidan sniffles and acts like he isn’t broken up just as bad at this cat that got hit by a car.
“Should we call someone?” Aidan crouches down a little closer, too squeamish to really look at the stiff-still black lump of fur. “The driver didn’t even stop, this sucks.”
I don’t know what to say, but then the dead cat gets to its feet. I clutch my coat in silence as this dead cat starts moving, but Aidan scrambles back with a gasp. He covers his mouth and stares right at the dead cat like he can see it too.
“Hey, kid. I know you can hear me.” The cat prowls forward with its tail flicked up and dodges underneath Aidan’s hand. One of its front legs doesn’t bend right, it bends too much, and I think I might be sick. I might be crazy again, except Aidan’s still trying to pet the not-so-dead cat.
“Oh, it’s alive! It’s alive!” Aidan laughs and chases the cat up on to the sidewalk. He might be watching this once-dead cat run around, but he can’t hear it. No way he can hear it. “Kitty, here, I won’t hurt you…”
“Meow,” says the cat. “Fucking meow, go away, hiss –” It swats at Aidan’s hand and then darts over to me.
I feel shattered bones moving beneath soft fur as the cat rubs into my ankles. “Pick me up,” the cat demands. I keep standing there not moving, gloved fingers knotted tight into my coat. “Hey, kid, pick me up. Look how fucking cute I am. Don’t you want to — dammit !”
A streak of black twists through my legs and scrambles up onto the hood of a parked car to escape Aidan. I keep staring at the way the cat’s front leg bends too much, the way one side of the cat looks flatter than the other as it turns and twists in a mockery of living flesh.
This cat is dead. This is a dead cat, and it’s talking to me. First dead thing bigger than a bug I see in four months, and it wants to talk to me.
“Ethan, help me,” Aidan says. “I think it’s hurt. We should get it to the vet. It looks like someone’s pet, did you see a collar?” He starts closer to the car with his hands out, murmurs and coos flowing from him to keep the animal calm.
The cat’s head swivels toward me. Ears flicking, tail twitching, pupils massive and gleaming. It lifts a paw to its face and darts out a delicate pink tongue. “Tell your friend to fuck off.” The cat checks Aidan’s progress between washings of its tongue over dense black fur. “Get rid of him so we can talk.”
My breath is ice that cuts from me in white puffs. “Let’s just forget about it,” I say to Aidan. I cannot believe how calm and steady my voice sounds. Maybe not as calm as I think, since Aidan turns to me with a worked knot of concern over his face.
“Let’s just keep walking. Let’s forget about this. I’m going to keep walking, just forget about it — let’s, let’s just –” Definitely not as calm as I think, the more I listen to my own terrified rambling. I turn sharply and move quick so what starts off as walking turns into full-out running.
I don’t want to talk to a dead cat. I don’t care how cute it thinks it is, I’m not talking to a dead cat. Four months without anything worse happening than a D on my chemistry midterm, and now a dead cat wants to talk to me. It’s not fair. It was too good to be true, what happened in the room without shadows, I knew it was too good to be true. I knew this couldn’t be over just because I wanted it to be over.
“Ethan! Ethan, wait. Ethan –!”
“No!” I shriek and pull my hand away from Aidan when he tries to grab me. It’s a lot of awkward tumbling before we latch into each other to keep from falling. I start pushing him away yelling, “I won’t! I won’t!”
That cat’s nowhere in sight, it’s just my best friend staring at me with big round eyes because I’ve gone crazy again. Four months of being so normal it hurt, because I knew this was going to happen. I just knew it was too good to be true.
I hit a trembling fist into his shoulder even though he’s just standing there letting me push and shove at him. White fogs from my lips as I pant, sob, shake harder and try not to keep crying because I don’t want to be crazy. I don’t want to talk to a dead cat, especially not one that wants to talk to me.
“I don’t want to,” I sob. I let go of Aidan to claw the tears off my cheeks.
“Ethan, we won’t,” he says. “You don’t have to. You don’t have to, okay?”
I don’t see the dead cat anywhere. Just nice cars and nice houses, two nice kids standing here on the sidewalk puffing white clouds into the cold. I wipe my nose into my palm before searching my pockets for a handkerchief. Aidan beats me to it and offers a monogrammed white square, because we are such nice kids and not at all the sort that go around talking to dead things. I blow my nose and sniffle.
“Sorry,” I say.
He’s wide-eyed as he watches me. “It’s okay,” he says. He waits some, turns an anxious glance back to where we were, and then pats at my arm. “Ethan, it’s okay. Um, I saw the cat, too,” he offers. “The cat was real.”
“The cat was dead.” I say it blunt and hard, voice thick from crying, and Aidan frowns worriedly in that way that so clearly says he doesn’t believe me. It’s the same worried look my mom gave me, when it was doctors and tests and then lying to make her think it all worked.
I know it’s crazy, but I keep insisting. “It was dead. It is dead. That was a dead cat.”
His lower lip gets pulled into his teeth. “Okay,” he says. “Well, I saw the cat, it didn’t seem very dead when it got up and started meowing –”
I clap my hands over my ears, scrunch my eyes shut, force the words out around the scared lump in my throat. “It was dead!” I shout. “Dead! I’m not talking to it! I won’t!”
Such a terrible silence follows. Finally Aidan’s fingers brush the arm of my coat, the gesture more heard than felt, and then he gently tugs my hands off my ears. “Okay,” he says. “Well, the cat’s not here anymore. I don’t think it wants to talk to you either.”
He’s trying to be nice. Poor dimple-cheeked Aidan is trying to be nice to his crazy best friend, and I won’t stop screaming about a dead cat. I breathe deep and open my eyes. Still no dead cat, nothing dead or out of place except these two nice kids trying to walk to the clubhouse for lunch on a cold Saturday. I stare around for a bit, each shadow a suspect to suddenly become a lumpy, misshapen dead thing meowing for attention.
“So, it’s okay,” Aidan says. “Ethan, it’s okay.”
“I’m going home.” I turn, shove my hands into my pockets, and then start walking. I need to forget about this.
Aidan keeps pace with me. I know he’s going to say it, even before he timidly offers a smile and gets up the nerve to confront his crazy best friend again. “Um, Ethan? Your house is the other way.”
“I’m taking the long way,” I tell him. I’m not going near where I found the dead cat, or where the dead cat found me — I know without anyone needing tell me that whatever was calling to me four months ago is back. It found me, it’s in that dead cat, and I’m going home to forget about it.
Aidan decides to come home with me, but he doesn’t say anything about it at first. I realize it when he keeps with me rather than take the turn down his own street. I stop walking and sniffle my cold, stuffy nose at him.
“Aidan, will you go home?” I ask. “Can you just go home? Please. I’m sorry.”
Growing up, Aidan was the kid who never wanted to be home. After school, weekends, holidays, Aidan would walk over and kick around my driveway until I’d run out to play or invite him inside. We’re too nice of kids for it to be an afterschool special kind of reason, it’s just that Aidan has two little half-sisters and a mom who was always busy chasing after them.
Unlike my mom, who redefines the word helicopter parent. She’s like a fighter plane, zooming over me loud and fast, not hovering so much as knocking me full of concern and then rushing off to the next harmless disaster in her life like making sure the school ice cream social has enough napkins. Her love is viciously affectionate at best, absently neglectful at worst. Maybe absently affectionate and viciously neglectful, if I turned out crazy, so I hate making her think I’m crazy. If Aidan comes home with me, she’s going to know by his worry that my good streak is over.
I just wanted to explain it, or have it explained to me, and Aidan went along with ouija boards and seances and everything else from books and the internet until my mom yelled at him for encouraging me. My mom yelling is her nose twitching while she talks softly about how she isn’t mad, just disappointed, and that she understands but wants you to be different anyway.
My father yells the same, only he is mad about it, and he really yells. I don’t tell him anything I see, I don’t tell him much of anything at all. He’s rarely home, or I try not to be when he is. I hunch my coat tighter against the brisk grey day and wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
“Aidan, I’m sorry. Can you just go home?”
“Oh.” He shrugs. “Yeah. Or, I could get my car if you wanted to go somewhere.”
I watch a patch of shadow under a car for much too long without saying anything. Assumptions bloom into the silence, and I see them on Aidan’s face when I finally think to look at him again. “I’m going home,” I say. “Just — forget about it. Forget about it, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Now I’m the patch of shadow under the car for him to stare at too long. I had four perfect months of assuring him the letter really did work and I was totally fine, nothing dead anywhere. Now I’m screaming about a dead cat that Aidan knows he saw get hit by a car.
He saw it same as me. He must have seen it get hit, go flopping over limp and dead. It was dead, he has to know it was dead I can’t be crazy. I’m not going to talk to anything dead.
Finally Aidan pulls in a breath and nods. “Okay,” he says. “Sure, Ethan. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
We exchange waves and go in separate directions through the neighborhood. Once I think Aidan can’t possibly see, I break into a run. I just want to get home before anything else dead finds me. I went into that room without shadows to do something so incredibly nightmarish that I’m still having nightmares about it. I wanted it to work, I’m going to forget about today.
Soon as my house gets in view I slow into a quick walk. I need to catch my breath. I don’t want my mom to know I ran home again because of something dead. On the porch I take longer than I need to get out my keys. I push inside and love the sickly-sweet floral waft of potpourri just because it’s home.
No one has ever died inside my home, it’s only as old as I am. My parents bought it to put me in, which is always a nice thought even when everything else is falling apart. I rest the back of my head against the door. I’m home. Nothing’s ever died in my home, not even a goldfish or a plant.
“Ethan?” my mom calls.
I pull my head off the door as she walks into the foyer carrying a black lump of fur with bottle-green eyes. My mother in her crisp tailored white linen suit is carrying a dead cat with a smile on her face. The cat twists to the floor and darts to me.
“Hey again, sweetheart,” the cat says. “Miss me?”
“I don’t want a cat,” I say. “Mom, I don’t want a cat.” I don’t look down at the creature rubbing against my ankles.
“Oh, come on,” says the cat. “Look at how fucking cute I am. How can you not want this? Which is your room — is it upstairs?” The cat leaps away from me and heads for the stairs.
“I heard him meowing outside and thought he might be hurt,” my mom says. “But he seems to get around fine. I already contacted the rescue Shelley co-sponsors. They’ll come pick him up on Monday, Ethan, surely you can put up with one lost cat for that long.”
“Yeah, princess, don’t be so greedy,” the cat says. He wraps around the railing halfway up the stairs.
I stare at my mother because she has betrayed me. She brought a dead thing into our home — I couldn’t get an iguana for six Christmases in a row, and she’s decided to bring a dead cat inside to play animal rescue with. I couldn’t even keep the goldfish I won at the school fair in the second grade, and she’s decided we’re keeping reanimated roadkill.
“Meow, meow, motherfucker, let’s go,” says the cat. “Get into your room so we can talk.” The broken leg is less noticeable as the cat scrambles up the rest of the staircase. He looks less dead inside my nice, clean house.
I take my shoes off in the entry and then go upstairs because this is a nightmare. I don’t know what else to do except go to my room. I don’t have to talk to the cat just because I’m in my room. If the cat wasn’t real — wasn’t talking to me — I’d go to my room anyway.
Maybe this is a new kind of crazy. Maybe I really am crazy and spent two hours wandering an abandoned building while Aidan circled the block in his car. He was willing to do seances and anything else, he went with me to drop off the letter. The cat doesn’t look that dead anyway.
The landing at the second floor extends over the foyer as a bridge of wasted space. As a child I could watch through the bannister as my parents fought in every room but their own. The master bedroom anchors the other end of the chasm. Memory seeps into the architecture of the house, so I spend half the time nostalgic and the other sickened.
My room is NASA posters, little league trophies, a neatly made bed in a well-organized square of some nice lie that my parents want me to be. I try to go along with it because I don’t have anything better. I’ll take things being nice and fake if the alternative is dead things talking.
“Boring.” The cat hops up to my desk and bats several pens out of their orderly lines. He pushes one to the floor. “What kind of teenager are you?”
I sit on the bed. I push toward the center. I try not to look at the cat as he wanders over my desk and steps up onto my closed laptop.
“So, kid, let’s cut right to it. I know you can hear me. Stop dicking around and let’s talk.” The cat settles into a statuesque sit with his tail curled around his feet. “What’s your name?”
“E–”
I slap a hand over my mouth, shove my knuckles against my lips and shake my head.
“Eek, how scary. A talking cat — get over it,” he says. “Yeah. I’m dead. The cat’s dead, I’m dead — everyone’s dead or dying, that’s life. What’s your name, sweetheart? Let’s be friends.”
The cat rises up and springs gracefully onto the bookcase. From there he crosses along to reach the headboard and then down into the pillows.
“I’m — you.” I get the words out around my hand. I don’t want to remember anything of that strange nightmare after I crossed the curtain, but I do remember everything. I can’t forget one word of the warnings I received from the only person who told me I wasn’t crazy, even if I desperately right now wish I was crazy instead of whispering at a cat — dead or not.
“I, you, me, yeah. That’s the idea,” the cat says. He saunters closer on tip-toes and walks right across my lap. Up close it’s easier to see the bent twist to the cat’s leg and the broken lumps along its side. Definitely dead, this cat has to be dead.
“I’m not telling you my name,” I say. “You – you can call me something else. Um, Reliabel-five — just Abel. My name’s Abel.”
Laughter tumbles from the cat as an eerie series of rumbling purrs. “That’s not your name.”
I don’t know why he’s so fixated on my name when he had to have heard Aidan and my mom both using it, but then I remember all those warnings. I set my hand on the cat’s spine as he arches toward me. I manage one stroke over the dense black fur before pulling my hand away. I don’t want to pet a dead cat. I don’t want a dead cat for a pet. This can’t be happening.
“It’s what you can call me,” I insist. “I’m not telling you my name.”
“You’ve been talking to someone,” the cat accuses. He turns in a tight circle atop my thigh, paws poking into muscle and claws catching into the weave of the khaki fabric. “Who the fuck have you been talking to about me?”
“No one. I just met you.” I try to push the cat off my lap and get an ear-flattened hiss for the trouble.
“I’ve been trying to get your attention for a while now, ever since you caught mine,” he says. “I had to be clever about it.” A sound like a bucket of rocks tumbling shakes out of the dead cat as it — he — laughs. “Meow, meow. I’m a fucking riot.”
Dimly overlaying the sharp-tongued and distinctly masculine voice is the treble trill of a cat, so I feel crazy again and put my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
The cat paces sideways off my lap with that bent leg tangled all the worse for the feigned casualness of the gesture. “Too bad, princess, we’re talking. Are you really going to deny me?”
I slide from the bed and back toward my desk. “I know you used the dead man’s eyes to watch me. You – you called for me.”
The cat sits on the spot of rumpled comforter where I was just sitting. He licks his paw again, scratchy tongue grooming in methodical strokes. The cat drags his paw over his crinkly whiskers and round-cheeked feline face. “Yeah, no shit, you stubborn fuck. Been calling at you for a while. I don’t like being ignored.”
“What are you? Who are you?” I ask. “Are you a ghost?”
Shattered glass and clattering stone form another loud laugh from the cat. I look to the door worriedly but don’t hear my mom calling. It’s a big house, a big stupid house my parents bought to put their new baby into like that would fix everything wrong with them and their marriage.
“Yeah, kid, I’m a ghost,” the cat says. “Is that how you want to do this? You gotta help me to like, move on, or whatever.”
“Okay,” I say. “How do I do that?” Anything to get rid of this dead thing that wants to talk to me.
The cat looks to be smirking as it watches me, long tail still flicking. “I need a body. You need to kill someone.”
“What? No!”
“I won’t be that picky. Just male, between 20 and 30, must be good looking. Brunette preferred although… maybe I’ll go blonde. No gingers though, and nothing messy. Keep it clean. No headshots.” The cat settles its paws and hunches down into a black loaf.
Each breath is thick as I stand there staring at this – this dead thing. Cat, ghost, voice — a dead thing, talking to me. A dead thing is telling me to kill people.
“No,” I say. “No. I won’t.” I grab one of the pencils off the desk and hold it in a tight fist.
I know Aidan saw the cat. My mom carried the cat in her arms. What if I’m just crazy, and my mom comes in here to see I’ve stabbed this cat to death? I’ll be shipped off somewhere so nice and expensive, so that my mother will fret and my father will simmer resentment in oppressive waves.
“I won’t kill anyone,” I say. “Find someone else to help you. I’m just a highschool kid. I’ve never even been in a fight.”
“You’re a necromancer,” the cat replies. “Why else do you think I’d be talking to you?”
I move closer to the door. I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want to know anything about it. I’m not going to be a necromancer. I’m not going to talk to dead things anymore. Talking to the cat was a huge mistake.
“Relax. It’ll be easy. You’re pretty enough. Just lure some perv to a hotel room and choke him out when he’s busy fucking you. Choking’s a good one. Nice and clean.”
I close my eyes. This has got to be a dream. This cannot be happening. I am not going to talk to dead things or become a prostitute serial killer. I turn for the door and then open it before the cat can do more than meow and hiss a quick, “Fuck wait!”
“Mom!” I call. I move into the landing. The cat weaves past me and escapes down the hallway toward my parent’s room and the office. I go to the center of the open overlook and call again, “Mom! Mom, are you home?”
I don’t hear her, so I go for the stairs while juggling out my phone. I fumble it through my fingers and the phone swan dives to a clattering death. Down each stair it goes until coming to a full stop. I hurry down after it and snatch up the garbled mess of a broken LCD and cracked screen.
“Mom!” Screaming it now, because I don’t want to be so crazy that I hear voices telling me to kill people. I can’t be that crazy, I can’t do that to her, and I tried everything I could not to do this to her but if I’m hearing voices that want me to kill people then clearly I’ve failed.
I run out to the garage and see her car’s gone. I pull my phone from my pocket but the screen is nothing but teal and green vertical bars beneath a spiderweb of broken class. I shove the useless rectangular lump back into my pocket and then go to grab my bicycle.
A rich kid like me ought to have a car by now, but my father disapproves so strongly of everything I am that he gets a perverse pleasure from denying me my own vehicle. I guess it’s snobby of me to expect one, because I could go get a part-time job to buy my own, but with my luck I’d end up with dead coworkers and a dead boss all trying to talk at me about killing people, because I’m definitely just crazy.
I assault the kickstand with my foot and then swing into the seat. I hear the cat yelling through the close door, but it’s indistinct rage that I leave behind. I didn’t grab my coat again — I didn’t even grab my shoes, so it’s just my socks digging into the textured grip of the pedals. The cold cuts through me as a frigid sting, but the harder I pedal and the faster the wind flies over me, the warmer I feel.
I fly down the sloped hill toward the stop sign and then blow right through it without slowing or stopping or even looking. I don’t want to see anything, I don’t want to see anything dead. Momentum carries me partway up the next hill before I lift from the seat and pump a hard, fast rhythm to keep going. I’m not going to talk anymore to dead things, and I’m certainly not going to kill anyone.
I don’t want to see anything dead on the way to Aidan’s house, so I don’t look at anything other than the street in front of me. I need his car, I need to go, I need someone to tell me I’m not crazy or someone to tell me what to do if I am. No, doesn’t even matter, I don’t care why this is happening. I just need to know what to do. Literally first living person I find — my mom, Aidan, the handsome man in the eye patch, whatever they tell me to do, so long as it’s not kill people.
Sweat flicks over my brow and gathers under my shirt against the small of my back. I grip into the handlebars on my bike and go faster, racing down the street with my heart pounding. Wind cuts into my face, tugs at my hair, and whips tears from my eyes. It’s so cold without my coat, but I’m burning.
I lean hard into the turn to avoid slowing as I turn onto Aidan’s street. I’m almost there. I see Aidan’s house, I see Aidan’s car. I see it much too late, swerve hard and miss, and cannot believe my best friend just hit me with his car.