“I just need you to love me as much as I love you,” I say with tears in my eyes. “I give and I give and I get nothing in return.”
I’m ignored, as usual.
“It’s always on your terms,” I continue. “But sometimes I need a hug too, y’know? I don’t want to have to wait until you’re ready to be affectionate. I’m sick of you batting me away when I need you the most.”
Continue reading “Why Don’t You Love Me? | Microfiction”
And so the ritual begins. Small humans roam the streets, all hyped up on the kinds of treats that big humans typically ration for the purpose of bribery. Humiliating outfits are abound, comprised of old rags, plastic sacks, enormous white sheets, obnoxiously large, wide-brimmed hats, and an array of peculiar masks which make humans look a smidgeon uglier than they already are. Vegetables are carved to look like ghoulish grinning faces and plonked outside doorways and in windows to give us poor felines a fright as we go about our night-time exploits. (Felines other than myself, of course. Nothing frightens me, I can assure you.) Then there’s all the noise—the yells and screams and cries from humans of all sizes, even the ones large enough and old enough to know better. The entire palaver makes my tail itch.
Continue reading “A Lockout | Short Story (Excerpt from ‘All Hallows’ Hell’)”
Missed Part 1? Read it here
Missed Part 2? Read it here
I remember the first visit to the specialist hospital for treatment. That building, a giant grey block of concrete, was like a great tombstone towering over us. I had visions of it careening over and crushing us as we walked through its doors. And it did, in its way. It snuffed out our spirit.
She grew sick of hospitals, sick of doctors, sick of me telling her to cooperate. And I was sick of her too.
‘I’m not going back again, Sharon. All they do is prod and poke me and then tell me its more doom and gloom.’
‘They’re trying to help.’
‘They all know I’m a dead woman walking.’
‘They’re trying to keep you walking for as long as possible.’
‘What if I don’t want to?’
‘You’re ready to die, are you?’
‘I think I am, yes. You should just shoot me rather than keep dragging me down that hospital.’
‘Alright, Mum. I’ll see if the bloke at Holme Farm’ll lend me his shotgun and we’ll put you out of your misery, eh?’
‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Absolutely. Would give me a great deal of satisfaction to blow your old brains out.’
Continue reading “My Mother and Her Cat (Part 3) | Short Story”
Missed Part 1? Read it here
The wee thing didn’t stay wee for very long. It grew at a rate of knots on a diet of sardines, mackerel, salmon, steak—bloody steak!—and anything my mother left on her plate after each meal. That sodding cat was better fed than Mark and I had ever been as kids.
It wasn’t fat, necessarily, but by heck was it big. Solid. Strong and burly like a furry, whiskered wrestler. It would strut up and down the street like a panther, intimidating anyone who dared to approach it with vicious hisses and snippy flicks of its tail.
Arrogant, it was. It would lay out in the middle of the road on its back, sunning its belly and getting its coat blathered in dust and flecks of gooey tar that had melted in the summer heat. When a car came along it wouldn’t move. Brakes would screech and cars would lurch to a halt, and the damn cat would merely peer up at the vehicle before it and blink at the driver, as though they were doing it an inconvenience. A pip of the horn or rev of the engine was the only thing that got it to shift, and even then it moved at half-speed, luxuriously stretching out each of its limbs as it got to its feet and wandered over to the pavement to find a new sunbathing spot.
And it was this sheer bloody arrogance that killed it. Eventually a driver came along that couldn’t give a cat’s arse for the wee thing and its ego.
Continue reading “My Mother and Her Cat (Part 2) | Short Story”
My mother always said that cats choose their owners. I always said that my mother talked a lot of old shite.
It wasn’t just when she was old that she talked nonsense. It started when I was young. Scratch that; it probably started when she was young. She insisted that eating my crusts would make my hair curl, but I ended up begging for a perm by the time I was fourteen because all the sodding crusts in the world wouldn’t put a single kink in my limp locks. She said apples were as good as toothpaste for brushing our pegs, but that theory was disproved when our Mark insisted on eating two apples a day instead of using a toothbrush and spent more time in the dentist’s office than he did in school. She insisted that leaving shoes on the table brings bad luck, but I don’t think I’m any unluckier than the next poor git despite going against this titbit of motherly advice more times than I can count over the last forty-nine years.
And she said for decades that she’d be dead by eighty. Said she could feel it in her bones. Said it was written into her fate. She got that wrong. No, she stubbornly hung on for as long as she could. Shame, really, because if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had to put ourselves through the shambles that was her eightieth birthday party.
Continue reading “My Mother and Her Cat (Part 1) | Short Story”
Are you a dog person? Do cats freak you out? Do you see the tiny face and giant eyes of a feline and feel a shudder run through you, as though you’ve gazed directly into the soul of the devil himself?
I used to be like you. A bite from a cat — a cat that had been purring beneath the gentle touch of my fingertips only seconds before it turned on me — put me securely in the ‘I Love Dogs’ camp when I was just eight years old. But now, twenty years on, I can say with hand on heart that I am both a dog and a cat person. Here’s how I did it.
“Come down. Please.”
“No.”
“But it’s been days.”
“I’m protesting.”
“You can’t stay in the tree forever.”
“I can if I want.”
“I said sorry.”
“Your apology is futile.”
“How can I make it up to you?”
The cretins have locked me in again. I can only assume it is down to the cold, white fluff which is falling from the sky. It may be chilly, but it’s awfully pretty to look at and rather fun to frolic in. I suppose it will have to suffice that I watch it through the window, since I have been unjustifiably incarcerated.
The worst thing about the locked door? Having to shit in sawdust, like a damn rodent. I don’t think the humans quite understand the importance of feeling grass beneath my paws when I relieve myself. Imagine if I took their strange, porcelain throne away from them; they’d feel degraded. Perhaps one day, if I ever manage to sprout opposable thumbs, I’ll do exactly that and present them with a plastic box instead. I think they’d soon realise that it pays to let a cat keep to his normal toileting habits. Continue reading “An Incarceration | Short Story”
The house seemed to have crumbled from the foundations up. If there were bodies buried within the rubble, they weren’t going to be easy to find.
The detectives were totally perplexed. It was the only house for miles around, and there’d been no witnesses to give clues as to what had brought the structure tumbling down. Continue reading “Hungry | Flash Fiction”
