Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  October 23

  We did not take Mosey to the vet. Instead, we took Kris to emergency care three days after her being scratched. She’d cleaned the scratches on her arm well enough, but one of the punctures on her thigh grew infected. When she woke up, it was with a low fever and two red lines radiating from the raised, inflamed puncture point.

  The urgent care visit was $165, with another $50 for a ten-day cycle of generic azithromycin. A little internet research revealed that azithromycin was linked to a sixty-five percent increase in miscarriage risk. One study showed no link to birth defects. Another said the risk for birth defects increased if taken early in the pregnancy. Kris pointed to how nobody really knew anything anymore, and you could find so-called facts to support any position. If a qualified doctor said it was safe, that was good enough for her.

  I seethed but said nothing. At least Kris agreed with me that telling friends or posting pictures was a bad idea. She had enough unwanted attention already.

  Even as the infection set in, Kris was quick to forgive and forget with Mosey. That’s just how she’s wired. I, on the other hand, harbored a grudge. Cat scratches and infections are potentially fatal. I knew it had been an accident, but I still didn’t understand why Mosey had reacted so badly with Kris and not with me. I asked my wife if she’d had any responses to the found cat fliers I’d taped up around the neighborhood. Not a peep, although my post on Nextdoor gathered many “so CUTE!” comments expressing admiration for her unusual black-and-white coloring.

  Once and only once, I mused aloud during dinner about whether this was the right time for us to have another pet, and maybe we should list her for adoption. I might as well have suggested eviscerating her with a butter knife.

  “She is our pet,” said Kris, unconsciously putting one hand on her belly. “Mosey is part of our family now.”

  Her wide, white stare dared me to contradict her. That battle was lost even before it started. Kris still struggled with childhood abuse and loss issues that made my youth look like a permanent Disney cruise.

  I let it go.

  A week later, I was neck-deep in a piece on server memory caching. I know, you’re desperate to find out more about caching, but I’m going to leave you in suspense. Kris had Tommy at the mall with her moms’ group, and Sam was sleeping in the hallway, muzzle resting on his favorite stuffed toy. I heard Mosey wander into my office, soft paws padding on laminate faux hardwood. She jumped onto my lap, somehow threading the narrow gap between my arm and thigh. At first, I ignored her. I’d allowed a truce to form between us, which to me meant that I would tolerate her presence and to her meant that I wanted her on me every possible second.

  Mosey circled in my lap, trying to find the most comfortable spot. I winced at the pinpricks. Something thin, leathery, and warm brushed across my hand.

  I made a choked sound and went rigid with surprise. Slowly, I scooted back from my keyboard.

  The wing was four or five inches long, with bones no thicker than small dandelion stems. Black skin stretched between them, so fine as to be nearly translucent, riddled with dark veins. The other wing remained half-tucked within its shoulder fold. Carefully, I drew out the appendage and found that it matched the other. Mosey purred as if proud of the attention.

  From the corner of my eye, I spotted something on my office floor, just behind my chair, and I twisted around to look. It was a brown mouse, about the length of my palm, with a long white tail that had a puff of brown fur at its tip. A bloody stump glistened where its head should have been. I wondered if her attack had been what loosened the wings from their pockets. Or perhaps the appearance of the wings had emboldened her.

  Mosey offered a long, warbling meow.

  I needed to clean the mess before Tommy saw it. Funny songs about freezing neighbors was one thing. Decapitated bodies in the safe space of his home was something else. I found a plastic bag and put the mouse in the outside garbage bin. Thankfully, there were only a few blood spots on the carpet, and I got the last of them clean ten minutes before Kris returned.

  My biggest concern remained the wings. Nobody would believe Tommy if they heard him trying to describe it, but how would Kris react? Could she still keep it to herself? Would she be terrified that our cat was morphing into some strange bat creature?

  Not in the slightest. When she got home and I called her up to my office, she found Mosey still curled in my lap. It was Sam’s first encounter with the wings, too. He and Kris had very similar reactions: tentative at first, then overwhelmingly curious and excited. Mosey endured their prodding with yawns and languorous stretching. She eyed their every move but made no objection.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Kris said. “Shouldn’t we tell someone? Like, for science?”

  I tried to hold my distaste of the idea at arm’s length. Sure, I wondered if revealing Mosey might lead to tons of press coverage and endorsements. She might be the next Grumpy Cat, and didn’t some huge company make that cat its mascot? The lure of turning Mosey into a cash machine was constant.

  The inevitable next thought was always the attention it would draw to our house. None of my original concerns had gone away, and I had no idea what celebrity would do to Kris with a newborn in the house. The post-partum depression after Tommy’s arrival had been brutal and unexpected. Even now, Kris sometimes reminds me about how I “disappeared into my office” for a year after Tommy was born. That’s not how I remember it, but nobody wants to hear the dad’s side, and there’s probably some truth behind her resentment. Regardless, I knew I needed to do better this time around. Much better.

  Also, if I’m being completely honest, I found the idea of the cat bringing in money deeply offensive. That was my job, my reason for getting up every morning, the do-or-die test of my abilities as a man. What would it say about me if I couldn’t cover the bills, but a cat with mangled DNA brought in buckets of cash?

  “Maybe someday,” I said. “How about we get through Madison being a newborn and see where we’re at?”

  Kris agreed, and her lack of objection told me she was relieved.

  She paused, grabbed my hand, and set it on her belly. I felt Madison’s foot or elbow push against my fingers.

  I grinned, fascinated by the surrealness, and leaned closer. “You go, girl. Get in those reps. Big gains.”

  Kris cupped a hand behind my head, bent down, and gave me a kiss. Displeased at having her space crowded, Mosey growled on my lap and dug in her nails.

  November 11

  When I awoke on the hallway floor, I didn’t know what time it was. The house was silent and dark. My hips and shoulders didn’t hurt yet, but my Kindle had timed out, so I hadn’t just nodded off.

  I knew this coddling of Tommy’s bad sleep habits needed to end. Everybody told us we only had to endure a few days of letting him “cry it out,” and he’d come around. Well, we’d tried that. Several times. In the battle between his will and our stress-frazzled, pregnancy-fueled exhaustion, though, his will had won for the time being.

  Truth is, many nights I was glad to curl up on the floor. I was so perpetually tired that I could have slept on rocks, and being able to let go of consciousness at nine o'clock was sometimes better than logging in another hour or two watching TV with Kris downstairs, even though I loved spending that time with her.

  No. That’s not the whole truth. I admit seeing Tommy’s head pop up, hearing him whimper my name, yeah, that got old and vexing. I wanted it to end. He needed to sleep through the night like other kids. But when I would whisper “shh-shh-ssshhhh” to him, over and over like the surf across a beach, and see how this reassured him and restored his peace, how could I withhold that from my son? Where else could I have that impact on another life?

  I listened, and all I could hear was the soft whirring of the motor that helped project wafting dark purple clouds across Tommy’s ceiling. From down the hall, I heard Kris snore once, then abruptly stop as she rolled over.

  I did not hear Tommy. />
  Quietly, I peeled away my blanket and slowly got to my knees. The sudden pop of an ankle was sometimes enough to wake him. I raised my head, but I couldn’t peer high enough over the edge of his bed.

  With one hand gripping the door frame, I gradually rose to my feet. Tommy’s Finding Nemo comforter remained pulled up around him where I’d left it. His upper body was elevated, because the boy had to have all the pillows.

  I couldn’t see his face, though. Something dark blocked my view.

  I stepped into the room, careful to avoid the creaky spot in the middle of the doorway. My night vision isn’t great, and I strained to make out details. I couldn’t see any rise and fall of his chest. I heard no sound of breathing at all.

  Then the dark patch moved.

  A black tail uncoiled and wrapped with languid grace around where Tommy’s head should be. The outline of one wing stretched to the side, then floated downward, as if in a wide embrace.

  I could not see my son breathing. The cat was on his face, smothering him.

  “Get off!”

  The heel of my hand slammed into the room’s light switch, and I felt the rocker break under the blow. Light flooded the room. Mosey rose from Tommy’s neck, back arched, wings wide.

  “Out!”

  I took one step forward, arm raised.

  Mosey leaped from the bed. She darted around me and scampered down the stairs. Tommy sat up as he began to wail.

  I went to his bed and stood over him, searching for any scratches or other signs of violence. He was crying, I realized. Breathing.

  Kris thundered into the room, squinting and blinking against the light.

  “What’s wrong? Is Tommy OK?”

  “The cat,” I started, then my mind stumbled. What could I say next?

  “What about the cat?” Kris searched Tommy’s face and body as she sat beside him and pulled him close, rocking him.

  “She was…” I faltered. “I found her on his head. He looked like he wasn’t breathing.”

  She stared at me a moment, then said, “Dan, she was cuddling with him. Sometimes, she sleeps in here.”

  “He…”

  Cuddling? But Tommy hadn’t been breathing…had he? And if he were being smothered, wouldn’t he have put up a fight?

  “Shh-shh-ssshhhh,” Kris said as she held Tommy closer. “It’s OK. Shh-shh-ssshhhhh.”

  I turned the lights back off. Eventually, Tommy stopped crying when Kris slid into bed with him. I folded my blanket in the hallway and went to sleep in my own bed, alone.

  December 25

  Merry Christmas. Or is it Happy Holidays now? I never know.

  Sorry to have been away so long. As usual, it’s been madness since mid-November. All my clients have their end-of-year budgets to either spend or lose. That’s good, because it means more purchase orders and more work. None of that work gets paid before the end of the year, though. And all my contacts are frantic with their own higher priorities, which means it gets harder and harder to reach people, do interviews, land review products, or even get questions answered by email. Whatever isn’t finished by mid-December gets suddenly orphaned as everyone goes on holiday for two or three weeks of paid vacation.

  That doesn’t change my deadlines. I still have to get stuff produced and turned in so I have work to invoice, but it’s essentially shouting into the void. No one is out there to help or even enter stuff into accounting. Only the deadlines remain.

  We’re at thirty-six weeks, which puts us in the “any time” zone. For expediency and peace of mind, we set up Tommy’s old crib in the bedroom corner by Kris. The month has been a blur of shopping, naps, and birthday parties.

  Is there a fate worse than toddler birthday parties? Living rooms outfitted wall to wall with Disney or Pokémon paraphernalia, bounce houses rife with concussion-causing collisions, and pizza parlor playrooms that smell like decomposing feet. The noise. The cheap sheet cakes big enough to fatten up a football team. All capped with the endless, instantly forgettable $30 toys from Target, brilliantly wrapped and assembled into a small mountain around the birthday child like piled spoils of medieval battle.

  And then there’s still Christmas shopping.

  We maxed out our first credit card last month. That leaves two others in progress, and somehow we’re receiving offers for more in the mail. Banks can always smell blood in the water and want their bite. I imagine they’ll send thank you cards if I miss a mortgage payment.

  Kris and I stayed up until 1:45 last night wrapping presents and watching the first two Die Hard movies. Tommy roused us at 6:30. After reminding him how unwrapping worked, we watched him tear into his stocking’s contents, and I thought about how this would be his last Christmas as an only child. I wondered if he would enjoy having a little sister and what would happen over time if he didn’t.

  Kris and I had agreed to cap our spending on each other at $50. Yeah, that never happens. I got her a purple orchid and some swirly gold earrings. I know the earrings make her feel pretty, at least on the first wearing, and when you’re thirty-six weeks pregnant, you need all the pretty feels you can get. She scolded me over the expense, but she never stopped smiling and wore them the rest of the morning.

  We got Sam a new tug toy and a Costco bucket of something like rawhide chews. Apparently, rawhide is now bad, and this substitute stuff is organic. Kris and Tommy picked out a plush new bed for Mosey that was actually marketed at dogs. She’d outgrown her kitty bed, partly because of her wings, which often fanned out while she slept.

  We also bought her a leash and a red cat sweater with a reindeer on it so I could walk her late at night after people were asleep. We always kept the doors shut and the blinds drawn, but Mosey clearly hated being cooped up. She wanted to hunt, as evidenced by her still somehow finding and eviscerating a rodent in the house every few weeks. The sweater would hold her wings down and hide them. The utterly bewildered way that Mosey examined the sweater on her made it worth every penny. Leading her outside on a leash only made it more laughable.

  Mosey did not agree. Around 11:00 tonight, while my family slept, and the neighborhood stood silent in a slow winter drizzle, I made it about half a block before she sat down and started scratching at the sweater with her back claws. Within seconds, the synthetic fabric frayed. I tried to distract her and get her interested in nearby bushes. After all, there could be critters in there. She wanted none of it. She flopped on her sides and rolled about, yowling miserably.

  I surrendered. Shushing her, I kneeled to pick her up and take her home. The fabric along her back was hot to the touch.

  “What the hell? Mosey, stop!”

  I could smell burning, as if the sweater’s nylon were melting. I tried again to lift her, but she twisted out of my grip. Kneeling beside her, I attempted to slip one of her front legs through the arm hole. She suddenly bit the back of my hand, teeth sinking into the soft flesh between thumb and index finger. I swore loudly and almost dropped the leash.

  Not knowing what else to do and afraid of the noise waking people up, I took out my Leatherman, extended the knife blade, stepped on the leash just below Mosey’s neck to pin her to the sidewalk, and slipped the blade under the crocheted knitting. I slashed awkwardly down the sweater’s length until it fell around her body and her wings sprang free. The skin around the wing bones glowed reddish-orange, seeming about to burst into flame.

  Mosey hissed, mouth gaping open, claws scrabbling on the sidewalk. She lashed at my shoes. Through my jeans, I could feel her heat on my shins, and her wings gave off an occasional whispery sizzle when a raindrop landed on her bones.

  With her wings free, though, the glowing ebbed and the cat’s wrath receded. Her manic hissing subsided to a low, menacing growl. I let up on her leash. We stared at each other. The malevolence in her eyes and bared teeth was unmistakable. It was the first time I felt a deep, primal fear of her.

  Only then did I think that perhaps this went beyond the bounds of genetic mutation. I don’t want t
o use the word supernatural. I don’t believe in magic, heaven, hell, or any of that. I believe in what can be repeated, measured, and corroborated. But I had no answers, and that terrified me.

  Standing there, in the middle of the night, confronted with my cat’s feral rage, the evidence before my eyes couldn’t be clearer. Her impossible wings steamed in the lamplight. She crouched low, about to pounce, and I wanted to drop the leash and run. She could flee into the night, back into her mysteries, and we could go our separate ways.

  Except she would come back. This was her home. And this time, she would bring attention with her. How many hours would it be until the first whispers of “hellcat” and “demon” circulated around Kris, especially among her churchgoing friends? Why, they would ask, had we hidden this creature for so long?

  I didn’t let go. With a quick snatch, I grabbed the sweater off the ground, already feeling the cat’s bite begin to throb. I dragged her for several steps before she reluctantly followed behind me. I scanned the nearby windows for lights or the shapes of onlookers. For the moment, I thought we were safe.

  I ducked through our front door, pulling Mosey in behind me. Kris sat in her nightgown at the top of the stairs, staring down at us, hands wrapped around her belly. She rocked back and forth, wincing.

  “It’s too early,” she said, “but I’m having contractions.”

  December 28

  Fun fact: Braxton-Hicks contractions, also known as false labor, are usually only felt in the front. Actual labor contractions typically start in the back and move around to the front. The other night, those were Braxton-Hicks. They gradually weakened as I helped Kris downstairs and got her walking around. By three in the morning, she could finally sleep.