The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Faerie Cat
by Christina Sng

The faerie cat always appears just before you’re about to die.

She sits on a tree branch near your window, in silhouette, watching the moon, asking it to give you another day of life.

Sometimes it is granted, sometimes it is not.

In the case of 15-year-old Lora Lee, she makes a fatal error.

Since she was a child, Lora has always longed for a cat of her own but her father never allowed it.

One day, a silver tabby kitten with bright blue eyes appears from beneath a tree and follows Lora home. She hides him in her bag and sneaks him into her bedroom. She names him Ben.

Ben is about a month old, an active, happy kitten who loves to curl up beside Lora to sleep. Lora manages to keep him a secret for a week before her father discovers him during a “routine inspection”.

He grabs Ben by the scruff of his neck and throws him out of the house. Lora pleads with him to let Ben stay but he turns to yell at her till she cowers and weeps.

Left alone outside in the unforgiving chill of winter, Ben mews plaintively, scratching anxiously at the front door as the cold rapidly seeps into his tiny body.

Lora’s father explodes with rage at the thought of his wooden door scratched to shreds.

He yanks the door open but before he can lay his hands on Ben, Lora rushes out, scoops the kitten into her arms, and dashes off the porch, staring at her father defiantly.

“You want that kitten, you stay out of my house forever!” he shouts, stepping forward to hit her.

“No!” Lora’s mother cries, grabbing his raised hand. He turns and smacks her head hard with the back of his hand. Lora and Ben watch, frozen in horror.

“Run!” her mother screams.

Lora hesitates, then flees with Ben. They hide inside an open garage belonging to one of their neighbors several blocks away, girl and kitten shivering in the bitter cold.

The faerie cat comes for Lora that night, but watching her shelter Ben against the blasting wind with her own thin body, she turns her attention to the creature who almost killed them.

It is not the first exception she makes and it will not be the last.

Lora and Ben sneak back home before dawn to collect her things, only to find an ambulance in front of her home.

She sees her father carried out in a stretcher, his eyes glassy and dead.

“Heart attack,” one of the first responders says, shaking his head. Another responder helps Lora’s mother out of the house.

Lora races to her. “Momma!” They embrace each other with relieved tears.

Overhead, the faerie cat smiles. Sometimes, a well-calculated fatal error works out for the best.

It is not the first exception she makes and it will not be the last.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!