Little Black Cat

Originally published in Fantasia Divinity’s Autumn’s Harvest anthology, available February 25th, 2018.

As far back as the little black cat can remember, he is the only cat who has ever lived at the house in the field.

There are other things, of course: stoats and voles and jays and ravens, and the barn owls that moved into the attic last year. He has seen Canada geese in V-formations, and though he knows they are much bigger than him, they still trigger some mindless, predatory instinct, a feline I want that makes him go wide-eyed and hopeful whenever they pass overhead. They never land here, anyway. The pond behind the house is too small and overgrown, and he has long since eaten the goldfish that the algae failed to kill.

The house and barn themselves, however, have become accommodating to the kinds of creatures that keep him fed. There is no longer anyone to chase them away or put out traps. Pest control falls on the little black cat.

The corn field has long since been given to weeds, though the wild oats bend high and golden in the autumn light against a backdrop of deciduous trees. The deer wade delicately through the field on long knobby legs, past the broken fence, in the golden hour before sunset when the light hits the homestead from just above the trees. This time of year, the wind has begun to bite, and from time to time he hears the sharp report and echo of rifles in the woods, but the hunters don’t come out here.

He leaps from the fence. The grass, grown wild for years, is taller than he is, and he can see little as he winds along his usual path, but he listens. Meadow voles scurry through the oats, and sparrows preparing for winter land on the stalks which bow beneath their weight and sometimes, if he’s very lucky, deliver them right into his waiting jaws. He is the wrong color for blending in here, and so, passing the deer—they lift their heads, swivel their ears and turn to look at him—he makes his way through the field. The oats wave over him and stripe his back. He could be any shadow on the ground.

This is the good season. In a month, the fields will be snowed over and he, still black, will have to turn to ambush attacks; pouncing from the shadows or the branches of trees or in the dead of night, pulling chickadees and cardinals from their roosts on high branches.

His tail flicks against the weeds.

A raven alights on the fence nearby and looks down at the little black cat in his hiding place in the weeds. He takes this as a hint, and rises, stretches, then leaps up onto the half-rotted post nearby.

For a cat, it is not a lonely life. And anyway, he’s not alone.

He sits until a rustle in the grass catches his attention. At once he crouches on the fence post, eyes wide and ears straight. He can’t see the vole, but nonetheless he has a clear sense of where it is.

There.

He bunches himself up and gathers his paws together, does a little dance with his hind legs, and springs. There is a scream, bigger than the vole’s body would seem to contain. It is there between his paws, just as he knew it would be.

The vole still squirms in his jaws as he trots toward the house, but he feels it relax halfway there. As he reaches the big oak tree at the side of the house, it dies.

There is a commotion from the yard: human shouts, young-sounding. The little black cat stops at the base of the tree and lingers there amid the dead leaves. He has seen children before, usually on chilly autumn evenings like this one. But not frequently. If they see him, they throw rocks, and so he has learned to stay out of sight. A pile of bicycles lies in the center of the dirt driveway. One lonely wheel spins in the wind. He watches as they go into the house, all nervous giggles. He wraps his tail around his feet and drops the vole he’s carrying, now wet with saliva.

There is a scream, shrill and muffled.

They burst from the doorway. The screen door slams against the peeling paint and closes in the face of another child, who shrieks and pushes it wide again. The little black cat watches, hunkered low, from his place among the leaves. He thinks the children will keep on running down the driveway and to the road, but they stop and pull their bikes upright. Some of them run alongside before they hop on. The screen door screeches as it closes, knocks a few times against the broken frame, and finally comes to rest.

One child turns. It locks eyes with the little black cat. It doesn’t move for a moment, but then it climbs on its bicycle and starts to pedal after the others, shouting frantically. Up the road, he can hear them laughing with relief as they ride away.

He mounts the rotting steps and enters through a tear in the screen door. His mouth waters, but this vole is not for him. The little black cat pauses at the threshold to the basement door to let his eyes adjust to the dim light, and descends the stairs past rusted tools and dusty jars of preserves.

Tonight, like all nights, she is screaming.

She never leaves the corner, and though the little black cat hasn’t quite worked it out, he thinks it may have something to do with the chains that hold her hands together behind her back: they end, fastened around a drain pipe, in a heavy steel lock that smells of dried blood. He’s not afraid of her anymore, though she makes the most horrible noises that hurt his ears. Something instilled in him by his ancestors makes the screaming bearable. He has no reason beyond instinct to be fond of her—she has never fed him or scratched him behind the ears or given him a string to chase—and yet he is.

The little black cat lays the dead vole at her knees, and she pauses. When she inhales her breath is shaky, but she sees him, and she hears the sound of his purr, and for a moment she is quiet.

He tries tonight, like every night, to rub against her knee, but like every night, there is no knee to rub against: just empty space, as though she is not here at all. And in the morning she won’t be. He learned early on that if he comes to visit during daylight hours, the basement will be empty, though the axe in the corner still sits rusting beneath a crust of dried blood, and the chains lie in a heap, piled at the base of the pipe.

He will wait with her until morning, when the pre-dawn glow colors the horizon and the birds begin to chirp, and she fades into nothing like she always does. Then he will eat the vole, and go out to hunt again.