Fresh Short Story: The White Cat

She sat in the bath until her skin became wrinkled and glowing, like her dried rose petals that greedily sucked up the thundering water. She told him, laughing, she'd read somewhere that the hands and feet form rivulets when wet to aid in the ancestral climbing of trees, when the bark was slick with rain. His lips lifted at one corner, too slight for her to notice.

The moment she touched the bed, he pinched her earlobe and dragged her from foot to pillow, where her frantically pushing legs fell to rest. Yet, with a fickle jerk, he looked away. A pinpricking sound had distracted him. As sometimes happened, he could feel a clock ticking. No analog clock was in the room and yet here it came, deafening, piercing, cutting each day into hour into minute into panicked second. She glanced at him from under her brows, but his gaze was focused far away on that slate of the time-slayer.

Controlling another human being came easily. There was no pride to be found there. But controlling time -- impossible. Or at least, impossible for him, now.

He saw the immense hammer of time slamming onto the anvil of himself, flattening him out, forcing him to fit into each moment precisely as intended, mapped, foretold. If he should touch her leg, it would be there. If he should stand and stretch, it would be there. If he should jump through the window, it would be there. Relentless.

He experienced a sensation of being drawn through a bright tunnel into the hotel room, and became aware that he had been talking, was still talking, while she goggled at him, and in pauses his tongue flicked at the backs of his teeth, sliding, probing, sensating. What was he saying? He listened to himself. "...only eight years old when the cat began to come to me at night, every night. It would gorge itself on my stomach, while I sat frozen in fear, bedcovers pulled to my chin. But the comforter and all made no difference to the cat -- a white cat, Persian, deaf, one blue eye and one green -- for it scratched a hole through the covers and inevitably uncovered my young white belly like a treasure, whimpering little mouse--"

"Um?"

He looked at her, finally. "Yes?"

"...I'm cold. I'm going to put on my nightgown."

"No," he said offhand, and clutched her wrist. He wanted to hear more of what he would say. "As this continued for nearly a year without respite, I became an insomniac. Then I would eat, eat and eat while watching late-night TV, even the infomercials if I had to, as though the food would strengthen my belly and ward off the wicked cat. I even tried covering my stomach with a pan, but the cat's fangs lanced through this like cream cheese. Of course my mother found out about my late-night habits and took me to specialists, but they were no use. I couldn't tell them about the cat. They would have said it was only a nightmare, you see; but it was real. Look--"

And he drew back his shirt, revealing on his belly a thick mass of scars climbing over one another likes snakes in a pit, an inhuman amount of scars. "So it's true," he gasped, while she only gaped at him, one wrist still locked. "That Persian cat...it lived so long. Longer than me."

He threw her onto the floor with such sudden violence that she reflexively covered her face. "Get out. Get out!" She stared, winced, then whirled to the task, throwing on clothes with hysteric haste. As she dressed, she heard him muttering, "It's coming to see me again. It needs me. That's how it eats away at time." He chuckled. "Yes, it..." She slammed the door behind her. She did not want to hear any more.

But he spread his body in the dim light, idly running his fingers over his smooth belly, speaking of the horrific white cat with a lopsided grin. This was how the cleaning staff found him in the morning: utterly unslept, staring at the ceiling with a deathly fixation, and deaf to the world.