A Cat in the Brain (or, Nine Lives, One Body)
by Daniel Beauregard
We wanted a cat and we got one. But it strayed too close to the roadside and a drunk clipped it pretty good; popped it on the back legs. I saw it all happen when I was getting the mail. It flew off the shoulder around fifty feet or so. The driver stopped immediately and began apologizing. Before he was five feet in front of me, I smelled the whiskey on his breath. But I didn’t bring it up. The guy was scared shitless—looked like a lawyer or something. Of course, the cat was dead—no denying that—but I didn’t want him to get a DUI just because he weaved a little too far to the right. For all I knew the car was out of alignment and he was tuning the radio. Too bad for the cat but it probably wasn’t entirely this guy’s fault. We looked at each other briefly and stood right in front of the thing and it was dead alright; something that fragile can’t survive a clip from a Civic going at least 50. But then it lifted its head up slowly, dragging its body upright, hind legs as limp as spaghetti noodles. The driver had one look at that shit and took off running. I stared up at the sky for a minute, breathing in and out, hard. The cat nudged my ankle, gave me such a turn I kicked it, more reflexes than anything else. My first thought was I had to turn and walk away, otherwise I knew I’d cross that line. So I did. But the damn thing followed me home. The wife shit a brick when she saw it, asked what the fuck happened. The kid just said the cat looked weird. I took it to the vet and the man told me, Well I’ll be goddamned if I ever seen anything like it, but it can walk on its front legs. I’ll have to amputate the back ones, of course, and it’ll need to get around in a little cart—I can sell you that—but it’s alive. That contraption cost me an arm and a leg. Cat too, I guess. A few weeks later—see it had a fascination with the road I think—it must’ve gotten hit by a semi. The wife and I found it laying in the middle of the road in front of the house next to the double yellow line, blood and guts everywhere, little cart AWOL. I ain’t scraping that shit off the pavement, the wife said, turning toward the house. Before I could even open my mouth, the little fucker got up and sped after her shuffling like a snake through the grass. You ever eat Fruit Leather when you were a kid? Thick pieces of smushed up fruit pulp. Each piece was about the size of two bookmarks placed next to one another. The cat looked like a giant version of that, covered in patches of bloody, burnt-out calico. The wife heard the swoosh in the grass behind her. She took a glance and made it into the house pretty quick after that. In a daze I sauntered down the walkway. There was beer in the fridge out back—I went around and grabbed the whole case—then made my way to the stairs on the porch and sat there, drank as many as I could, as fast as I could. I sat and watched the sun fall behind the trees. That deadass pancake cat sauntered up to me, nudged my ankle again, made a chittering noise with its crushed vocal cords. I tried to ignore it, but by the time it’d gotten dark it’d wrapped itself around my leg. My wife switched on the porchlight and came out to see what I was doing, then screamed her way back inside, locked and bolted the door. So there we were: me, working my way through a case of warm beer, and the cat, wrapped around my leg like a tourniquet. It must have been sleeping. Eventually, I drifted off too. When I woke it was gone. The yard was covered in beer cans. I threw em away as the sun was coming up, then slept for 12 hours on an old couch in the shed. My wife threw the door open late in the afternoon and said, We gotta to do something. The kid was off playing down the road, so we spent the afternoon searching for it. Hours later we found it in the road all stretched out like it had been the first time. I nudged it with my foot—it sort of moved—then I snatched it up with a pillowcase. The goddamn thing stank so bad we both puked. Five minutes later we peeled out of the driveway, gravel spewing left and right. The tires squealed when we hit the pavement and twenty minutes later, we were at the old quarry, driving down the road that led to the swimming hole. When we reached it, we stopped and got out. The water was clear and blue, filled by creek runoff from the mountain snows. We popped the trunk and pulled out that pillowcase and filled it with as many stones and rocks as we could find, then stitched the thing closed with some old fishing line I had the size of chicken wire. Took the both of us to haul it to the side and roll it off the ledge. We watched it as it sunk deeper into the clear blue water—until it just looked like another one of the rocks that lined the edge. Drove home without a word. That night, I told the kid the cat ran away. I looked for it with her the next day. Then the next. After a while she forgot all about it. We got her a puppy. Honestly, she seemed happier. One day we were all in the yard and the dog started barking at the tree line, hackles going up like it saw a bear. Ain’t no bears here. I was holding his collar looking in that direction but couldn’t see anything. Then the bushes moved so softly it could have been the wind, and there it was. The goddamn cat. Even the kid took off screaming at the sorry rotten thing, dragging itself along as slow as a tortoise. The wife rushed her inside. Once I knew they were both in, I let go of the dog’s collar and he had at it. Ate the whole thing. Thought that was the end of it. Then the pup started acting up; wasn’t eating, wouldn’t shit. We took it to the vet. The x-ray showed a bowel obstruction. We got the operation, but the dog didn’t pull through. While the wife regaled the kid about doggie heaven, I pulled the vet aside and begged him to burn it. He did. The three of us went home with a cheap urn in a cardboard box. The piece of masking tape on top read Soda Pop. We put it on the mantle in the living room.
A loud crash woke us in the night. In a fever, I grabbed a baseball bat out of the back of the closet and crept downstairs, told my wife to run to the kid’s room and lock the door behind them. I took the stairs slow, thinking about where the steps might creak. Didn’t matter though, wasn’t no one in the house. When I got downstairs the living room was illuminated by a soft glow, the corners full of tiny phosphorescent things that looked like caterpillars. I got closer up and I’ll be damned if they didn’t resemble tiny little pieces of shit. I took my cell out and pulled the flashlight app on, but they darted away quick as mosquitos, so I shut it off and stood there in silence, looking at the things clustered in the corners of the living room into what could have been a shape. Then I let that baseball bat fly, splattering the walls with phosphorescent goo. My wife was screaming bloody murder upstairs, so I shouted that everything was alright, a rat had gotten in and knocked over one of the lamps. I was taking care of it. I squashed every last piece of phosphorescent shit I could find until I was dripping with ectoplasm, then passed out on the couch. The next morning the living room was a mess; all the curtains were ripped, and the furniture overturned. I woke as soon as the sun hit the floor and started making coffee, fixing things up as best I could. My wife eventually entered the kitchen and looked at me, tired. Only thing I said was, That bastard rat was quick as lightning. We were both holding back tears. Things were alright after that until a few weeks later I developed a rash, all scabs like a reptile man. The doc made a house call and said it could have been a number of things. He prescribed me an antibiotic cream I used for several days then discarded. Things got worse. We all got the rash. Sometimes I awoke in the night to strange sounds and rushed downstairs with the remaining strength I had. Last night, I had a coughing fit, this one particularly horrible—a mix of blood and bile. Thankfully we’d taken to keeping bedpans nearby. The whole family sleeps together now in the same double bed; it’s just easier. I began choking, gasping for breath. My wife, not knowing what else to do, pried my jaws open with her hands and shoved her fingers down my throat, reaching as deep as she could, and slowly, drew the tail out of my mouth.
Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places including the Action Book Blog, Propagule, ergot, Self Fuck, New South, Burning House Press, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He's the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry, most recently Total Darkness Means No Notifications (Anstruther Press) and Anatomizing Uncanny Alley (Self Fuck). His full-length collection of poetry, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics and his splatterpunk novel Blood Pudding from World Castle Publishing. His post-apocalyptic novella The Mother of Flowers is forthcoming from The Wild Rose Press, and his first collection of short stories, Funeralopolis (Orbis Tertius Press) and existential horror novel Lord of Chaos (Erratum Press) will be published in 2023. Daniel is also co-founder of OOMPH!, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry and prose in translation. He can be reached @666ICECREAM.