I did promise to inflict short fiction upon this blog!!!
TW: suicide, severe child harm
She landed two blocks north of her intended location, logged the discrepancy for the review board, and began walking.
The weather was as she remembered, chilly but not cold, the trees just beginning to turn. Late September in the Upper Midwest brought normally repressed personalities to the fore. Some houses already had their Halloween decorations up; others clung to summer tomatoes and zucchini in their front yards; others had long since allowed their yards to dry and fade, dead grass rustling in the wind. Scattered over the sidewalks, storm-downed green-leafed branches and small dead brown leaves. There would be enough leaves to wade through soon, red and orange and premature green-yellow.
She smelled wood smoke. A pizza oven, or a fire pit, or remnants of a wildfire a thousand miles away. She'd have to check the news to be certain, but she didn't have time for that. Even by taking a few minutes to survey her surroundings had put her behind schedule.
The streets were smaller than she remembered. Well, she was taller; it was easy to walk two blocks south. The flyer she remembered stretching far above her head was now shoulder-height, laminated and stapled to an electric pole.
They'd chosen a nice, clear picture of Muffin. Her characteristic calico pattern and her big, worried eyes stared out from beneath shiny plastic. Beneath her picture, the basics: MISSING CAT: MUFFIN. $500 REWARD IF FOUND. PLEASE TEXT 612-555-5555 WITH SIGHTINGS. PLEASE DO NOT CHASE HER, SHE IS SHY!!!
She remembered insisting that they add that Muffin was shy. She remembered her mother, exhausted and angry, saying, "All cats are shy, Charlie." She remembered her leg hurting. Bruises on the insides of her thighs.
The sun dipped behind a four-flat and a car ran over a manhole, sending out a clanging boom that made her tense, almost jumping. She had period-appropriate clothing and weaponry; no one would notice her. She couldn't help but feel she was being watched. She peered in the windows of houses, at the passing cars, at the men standing outside the gas station. No one seemed to care that she was there.
Finding Muffin was a distant memory. Had she been under a car? Up a tree? She didn't remember, and no one was left to tell her. But the search itself was a recurring dream, a sense memory as sharp as a tack pressed against the webbing between her fingers. She had run and walked and screamed and cried. She had thought about fleeing for good this time. She had begged bus drivers and bike messengers for help. She had fumbled with near-numb fingers as twilight faded into full dark and the temperature dropped.
In the present-past, a dog barked. She jumped -- turned -- tripped on the ragged edge of an old sidewalk. She didn't fall; she caught herself on a Little Free Library. A bird chittered above her as she took deep breaths, trying to calm the heart she knew to be racing.
Muffin! Muffin! Muffin! Muffin!
A thin, wailing child's voice, overlaid by a bored baritone. He had helped her that day. Later, she would wonder if he'd spotted Muffin and led the search away from her, drawing out the chase. How far could a cat reasonably go? She had no reason to suspect he might have done it, except knowing it was the kind of thing he'd do. Later still, she had wondered if he'd let her out to begin with. But they had found Muffin in the end.
The dregs of rush hour asserted themselves in the form of too-large cars thundering down too-small residential streets. She watched squirrels race ahead of the cars, listened to branches crack under enormous tires. A gunmetal gray F-350 sped past her, barely slowing at two stop signs and tripling its speed when it turned onto the arterial road. She still stood with her hand against the Little Free Library, waiting: for more cars, for people walking their dogs. For the wail of a child's voice. Instead she heard, felt, smelled silence, as if everyone around her had disappeared. Of course, she saw the warm lights in windows, the flickering of cars on that larger road. It was impossible to believe herself truly alone. But she had been, once, and not so far from here.
Muffin! Muffin!
She kept walking. Towards the voice, this time.
The sun dropped below the two-story houses, then below the cottage-size garages. Street and security lights made their presence known, sickly yellow mixed with too-bright blue-white. Occasionally she saw orange and purple: premature Halloween lights, still legal in this city.
She slipped on moldy leaves. Just a little. She stayed upright this time, but the moment of locked-muscle stillness let her pick out what she hadn't noticed before: a small child, alone now and silent, staring at the large house with the gambrel roof and overgrown corner lot.
The house, she remembered. The faded teal paint, the cracked driveway. If she'd known the owners, she'd long since forgotten. She did remember some people. Mrs. Stevens lived further down, and Mr. Belmont had died already. In her and her siblings' imaginations, this lonely house had been empty, or rather haunted. It was very easy to imagine homes like this teemed with undiscovered monsters.
She also remembered that outfit, or most of it. A coat she'd begged for. Jeans that would be ripped during the next holiday. Shoes that had worn thin and pinched her toes tight before they were replaced. She had loved those shoes, though: red with green and blue hearts. She had drawn Pokemon on the soles.
She cleared her throat. It was a mistake. The child, aware of every sound, now looked at her with wariness that bordered on fright.
"Hey. Kid."
Still a child, though. "What?"
"You're looking for a cat, right?"
This, she had forgotten, or more accurately had never learned: the heartbreaking ease with which a child failed to lie. The suspicion and aching hope, the expectation of cruelty and inability to imagine an escape route. The pain, so obvious that she wanted to grab everyone by the shoulders and scream, how didn't you notice? Why didn't you say anything? Look at her!
But none of them were here right now. She looked, and waited, and the child said, "Yes."
"What's its name?"
A stubborn chin stuck out. "Her name is Muffin and she's mine and I love her."
"Muffin, huh? Good name. What's she look like?"
She should have said 'why do you want to know' or handed a flyer over. Instead she crossed her arms and said, "Spotted! And worried and shy!"
"Spotted, worried, and shy. All right." She nodded over at the teal house. "I saw a cat kind of like that run under the deck over there."
Finally, a note of doubt. "Muffin ran under a deck?"
"Yeah. Just over there. I can show you?" She made a show of looking around. "Or, if your mom or dad is around, we could get them instead."
It was like throwing a boulder into a puddle. Fear didn't ripple over the child's face so much as it consumed her. She squared her shoulders and said, "No, just show me. I can look."
"All right. C'mon, then."
Across the street and down the sidewalk. A small distance. She noticed the red light of her tracker blinking in her pocket, informing her that she was off course, out of time, endangering herself and everyone around her. Well, herself. She ignored it, and the child didn't notice the light at all.
They walked across the teal house's lawn. She said, "Come around back."
"But you said under the deck?"
She did her best to act like a high schooler caught drinking beer by the kid she was babysitting: impatient, superior, but possible to impress if you were very determined. "Yeah, the back deck. Come on."
The child couldn't reach the fence's latch, but she could. She opened the gate for both of them. She led the child through a thicket of overgrown lavender bushes, then crouched down in front of a deteriorating crawl space. "In here."
The child wrinkled her nose. "In there?"
"Well, under. That's where I saw her run."
For a moment it seemed reason might win out. The child looked at her and at the crawl space entrance, then back at her. She said, "How did Muffin get inside?"
She rolled the dice and kicked the rotting wood. It gave way easily. "Cats can slip into small spaces."
"Yeah," the child said, crouching down.
She pulled out her flask and took a long drink, surveying the yard. They weren't visible from the street. The teal house's Ring camera pointed in the other direction, watching the gas grill and the adirondack chairs. The child narrowed her eyes, straining to see into the dark. "Muffin? I don't see her!"
"She might still be there. Check again."
She drained the flask of gin. In the intervening years she'd tried it all. His favorite, tequila; her mother's favorite, wine. Her grandmother's favorite, opiates. Her sister's favorite, weed. And of course the recommended cures as well: talking, SSRIs, antipsychotics, benzos. Nothing worked quite as well as clear liquor. But then, nothing worked.
The child turned. Suspicion wrinkled her brow. "She's not there. Are you sure you saw her?" She turned back to squint into the darkness. "Ew! A spider!"
The red light in her pocket blinked faster, faster, faster. But it made no sound. There was nothing to warn the child except the crunch of not-quite-dead leaves as she leaned forward and wrapped one arm around the child's throat.
And of course the child thrashed, precise movements borne of experience. She herself had never practiced this part. Immobilizing the muscles, silencing the screams. Holding the child until the child became a body. Feeling the furious stillness fade to limp emptiness.
She lay the body down in the crawl space. It was small and easy to hide. She cut her hand on a nail at the end of a broken board, but that wasn't what made her fall to her knees. It was the pain. Her lungs screamed, her jaw throbbed. She felt blood leave and rush into and leave her head again.
When she had thought about it, she had imagined crumbling to dust or simply blinking out of existence. Or just dropping dead. She had assumed the world would do away with her the way you might swat a fly or smooth out a wrinkle in your outfit. She had not imagined experiencing her own pain.
She died silently, screaming through a swollen throat, chest collapsing, fingers twitching. She saw her own body last: the small face turned to the side, its expression frozen in ascendant terror.
