Uncategorized – Elocin Press

My mother kept a box of all my baby teeth I gifted to the Tooth Fairy when I was little, so I used one of those. I had a copper penny from 1952 and a vial of my blood drawn fresh that morning. He looked over each item, sniffed it, then put it in a pocket of his black cloak.

The dark river was smooth. The sensation of going down it was like only the river that was moving and we were locked in place. I had imagined it would smell awful but it was fresh like spring and made me long for the world of the living. I sobbed the entire ride.

The next thing I remember is being in a cave. It was dark cold stone. I felt feverish. My blood was too hot and my skin was too cold. My mother had asked me to ask her mother where something was. My mother wouldn’t tell me what. She said her mother would know what she was asking about.

I had no desire to ask for my grandmother when I was in there amongst the dead. Instead, I whistled and called out for our cats. Sunshine. Fat Cat. Smarty Pants. Vicious. Each one came running. A small table and four chairs appeared. My cats sat down like people. I noticed they were wearing leather dress shoes and jackets with ties. Windsor knots. Vicious placed a deck of cards on the table.

“What game do you want to play?”

I sat down on the floor between Fat Cat and Smarty Pants.

“Little Metal Man,” I said. I had no idea what game that might be or why I had said that.

Vicious shuffled the deck. “That’s a difficult game.”

“Whose life are you betting,” asked Smarty Pants.

“My own?” I hadn’t expected to say that either.

“That’s the only way one should play it,” said Sunshine. “Kudos!” He lifted his back leg, put his paw in his mouth and cleaned his toes. He made a strange gnawing sound. I smiled. He was still a cat even though he could talk and play cards and sit in chair.

“You think that’s funny?”

I thought to lie. But I shrugged. “Yeah.” I copied the noise.

Sunshine lifted his head. “That is not what I sound like at all.”

“If I were about to give my life for a card game, I doubt I’d find such things amusing,” said Smarty Pants. “But seeing as I am already dead, I’ll concede that such sounds are droll.” He lifted his left front paw and gnawed on it making that same goofy noise, then threw his head back and laughed. His white whiskers flitted about and I reached out to pet him because he was so strange and adorable and he scratched my hand. I apologized. “Try and touch me again and I’ll cut your throat. Wide open.”

The four cats looked at each other and giggled.

“Pay attention now,” said Vicious. She rapped the deck of cards on the table three times. We all sat up straight. She shuffled the deck, split it once, and dealt to all but me.

“I thought I was playing.”

“You are what we are playing for.”

I watched them play but could not understand the rules. The deck they were playing with was unfamiliar. The game went on for some time. It wasn’t any sort of poker. It was maybe a little like whist.

Sunshine won. Just as I opened my mouth to ask what happened now, I vanished and reappeared inside of Sunshine. I was the living human me inside my dead orange tabby. I looked out at all my fellow cats. I looked at my orange tabby paws. I felt my particular cat tongue sandpapery inside my cat mouth with my sharp teeth that could break little animal necks and rip flesh. Sunshine stood up. He said, “So long. I suppose I’ll be back soon enough.”

We tromped out of the cave, me inside Sunshine, on all our four paws, prancing. I felt spectacular. Limber and fast. I could see all sorts of things I never saw before. I was on high alert. By the time we reached the river, I was walking on two legs and looked like myself again but I was Sunshine. I got in the boat and I put my hand in the soft water. It was almost too cold. The fresh scent of life was strong. The scent of living things. When the boat came to shore I stepped out. The ferryman said nothing. I wanted to ask him if he knew that I was no longer me. That there was a dead cat from my childhood moving me about. But I couldn’t make myself talk.

I was left to my own thoughts as we walked home. I was a prisoner inside my own body. I had no way of communicating. I had no access to what Sunshine was thinking but I could sense him. I could feel his awe. I sat back inside myself and watched.

The first thing we did on my return home was sit at the kitchen table and ask my mother to make us a pastrami sandwich. We watched her as she took out the bread and the meat and the mayonnaise and the mustard. We watched her as she sliced tomatoes, salted and peppered them. She washed a piece of lettuce and dried it. We took note of our body there in the kitchen, sitting in a chair at the table. We laid our hands, my human hands, flat on the baby blue wood. There was the scab on my right hand from when Sunshine had swatted me. I licked it, my wound. I watched my left hand turn. We studied closely my palm. The lines of it. How strange. We looked up and our mother was standing there holding the plate with our sandwich.

“You on something?”

She set the plate before me, ripped off a paper towel and gave that to me too.

I used my hands to pick up the sandwich. I put it in my mouth, carefully. I took a bite. Wow. I chewed slowly. I closed my eyes. Wow.

“So? Tell me. What did my mother say?” She tapped the table with her long pink fingernails. O! That was an exciting sound. My eyes popped open and I watched her fingernails dance and I wanted her to scratch my head. Scratch my back.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. It’s nice to be here again. In the land of the living.”

“My mom? Did she tell you what she did with the thing?”

“I didn’t see her.”

“Who did you see? What was it like?”

“It was like a cold dark cave.”

“I told you it wouldn’t be any fun.”

“No, it’s not what I would call fun.”

“They say a trip to the dead changes you.”

The cat smiled. “That it does, Mother. That it does.”

(Story expanded from vss365 prompt ambiguous but without the word ambiguous.)