by Nora B. Peevy
“That is the most ghastly picture.” After almost one year of
marriage, Trevor knew this would not be an argument he would win, and the
famous poster for Le Chat Noir mocked him, the black cat sitting smug with its
slit yellow eyes like two rotten grape halves, an impervious fixture in the red
and yellow bathroom. Trevor suspected Ginny decorated the bathroom with the precise
intention of buying this hideous piece of iconic art. He winced even before she
opened her mouth to speak with a mouthful of toothpaste, a habit he abhorred.
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it about as much as I like dog shit on my shoe.”
“Well, I think black cats are very fashionable. Did you know
Poe’s black cat, Catarina, inspired the story, The Black Cat?”
Trevor turned away, queasy, not wanting to watch the
toothpaste dribbling over her chin as she spoke. “So what, now you’re a budding
horror savant? Since when did you become Tom Savini? I’ll meet you in the
bedroom.” He stomped off to bed. And what does Poe have to do with anything?
Since when did Ginny read Edgar Allan Poe? She had preemptively googled black
cats, storing that annoying nugget of information away in her obsessive-compulsive
brain to fire off later when he complained. He yanked back the covers and flung
himself into bed like a six-year old.
Ginny padded to bed in her purple slipper socks. It was
apparent to her now she’d been possessed by bridal envy, for what woman in her
right mind would marry Trevor with his sagging piggy paunch and the doughy
flesh slipping beneath his raisin eyes. Why, he looked fifty, though barely
forty-one. “Until death do us part", looked grimmer than a never-ending root
canal with no analgesics accompanied by Kenny G.
“Are you going to wear those things to bed?”
“Yes. My feet are cold.”
Resigned to another sexless evening, Trevor turned off his
bedside lamp and rolled away from her.
With a small huff, she pounded her pillow with a closed
fist, imagining Trevor’s face, and when she elbowed him, trying to get
comfortable, she grinned like a smug cat. Serves him right, she thought.
Trevor lay listening to his wife’s snoring freight train
symphony, every snark and snork, fueling his boiling frustration. Restless, he
tossed and turned, checking the alarm clock every five minutes. And to
think he had married this woman “until death do us part.” God certainly had a
wry sense of humor. The snaky bastard. Groaning, he threw back the
covers and headed downstairs in the dark, stubbing his toe on the antique table
in the hallway. “For the love of Mephistopheles,” he roared. Not like Ginny heard
him. She was sawing logs with a thousand lumberjacks at this point.
He padded downstairs to the refrigerator and like a cranky
badger comfortable in his environment, reached with a blind paw for the milk,
squinting at the diagonal swatch of light falling across his toes. He drank
from the gallon jug, asserting his manhood and reminiscing about his bachelor
days as he felt something furry brush against the plaid pant leg of his pajamas,
but upon inspection, found nothing there. However, the hair standing up on the
back of his knuckles alerted Trevor to something watching him in the murky darkness
with a hunter’s prowess. And on the way up the stairs, a slight breeze floated
past his ankles.
Attributing the breeze to a draft coming from the floor to
ceiling windows in the hallway, Trevor settled back into bed beside his
snarkaleptic wife and prayed God would come and take her away. He kicked at the
blankets. He hated how she always tucked the sheets in at the bottom of the bed
like an obsessive nursemaid, trapping his feet. He liked his feet free to move while
he slept. She knew that. But she didn’t care. Ginny only cared about her stupid
cat collection. She could not have a hundred real cats because he was
deathly allergic, but their likenesses gawked at him from every unoccupied inch
of space in every friggin’ room. She was the Pied Piper of cat bric-a-brac. Ugly
cats. Calico cats. Black cats. Striped cats. Cats ubiquitous. Cats
omnipresent. Cats everywhere. Trevor fell into a restless sleep, dreaming
of cats. He couldn’t even escape them in the private sanctum of his own mind.
End of excerpt
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