"Cat Nip" by Len Kuntz

I didn’t know how the cat got in. You weren’t allowed to have pets in our building, and I certainly didn’t own one. I hated animals.

When I opened up the shower curtain, the thing bristled and hissed at me. It had pus-colored eyes and smelled like sewage. When I told it to get the hell out of there, it leapt up and ripped its claws across my cheek. Bloody paw prints were all I saw once my eyes stopped burning.

Returning from work that night, I heard chaotic bumping and shuffling noises in 42B. I might have suspected wild romance, but my neighbor was Mrs. Kindling, seventy-seven and sluggish. When I knocked, all the motion inside ceased. I put my ear to the door. I thought I smelled sewage. I thought I heard mewling, then a ripping noise.

There was a work party the next night. I drank too much, flirted with the boss’s wife. Decided to walk it off. Took an alley I shouldn’t have.

Six dozen of the creatures were waiting. They flew at me like bats. I saw a blizzard of fur, felt their swipes like razors.

The cops who came to the hospital didn’t believe my story. They said I was suffering from shock, trauma.

The press dubbed my assailant The Slasher. On the news I saw a reporter describe my attacker. Then she showed a “disturbing and graphic” picture of my face, covered with row upon row of stitches.

Coming home, I noticed cat fur coating the carpet like cottonwood fluff. I stopped at Mrs. Kindling’s door. Knocked. Nothing.

When I wrapped on the Superintendent’s door, he buzzed me in and the hinges sent the door swinging open.

It was dark. I stepped on something meaty and wet. I bumped into a chair. I called, “Mr. Andoni?”

The door slammed shut. The light flicked on.

A huge calico, wearing an eye patch and chomping on a stubby cigar, sat across the desk.

“What the hell?” I said. “Where’s Andoni?”

The cat burped up sandalwood and licorice notes—Andoni’s cologne! “You killed him? Ate him?”

The cat raised his paw, curled a claw. He wanted me to sit.

When I did, he flipped his lap top toward me. On the screen were four separate stories—Cleveland, Seattle, Memphis, Bismarck—about a certain Slasher on the loose.

“You gave us the idea,” the calico said.

“So, you’re, you’re attacking innocent humans?”

“You should try subsisting on rodents and Kibbles your whole life.”

“This is insane.”

I sprang out of the chair, but a posse of black felines had my passage blocked. Seated on their haunches, fangs bared, most foamy-mouthed, they looked a demonic crew.

“You can’t do this.”

“No?”

“Please.”

“Say the secret password, and we’ll let you go.”

“Secret password? I don’t know.”

“Tough luck then.”

“Wait! How, how about abracadabra?”

“Nope.”

“Open sesame?”

“Nah.”

“Please.”

The cat chortled, motioned his men forward and said, “I like mine a little on the rare side.”

About Len Kuntz:
Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State. His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as The Ramshackle Review, Blue Print Review, Troubadour 21, and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Excerpt from "State of Nature" by Eric Victor Neagu

By autumn, when she was well into the third trimester, he had written no more than a hundred pages of his book. His private goal to complete the novel before the baby arrived seemed nearly impossible. He marked the days of her pregnancy to add productive pressure to the writing. Each morning when he began, he notched a strong black stain into a piece of bleached oak he found on the shore. But after a few weeks it just reminded him of how poorly the novel was moving, and he gave this up.

Meredith was uncomfortable with their new arrangement. She thought they had become more like roommates than lovers. It seemed like a good idea to poke her head into the office periodically to ask questions about the book, something Michael hated to discuss. Head poking soon became walking in and sitting down. His best efforts to dissuade her intrusions failed. Offering only monosyllabic responses and a variety of grunts for conversation, still she came.

After her stylistically slight, almost inaudible, knock one afternoon, Michael lost it. “Can you not leave me alone for one day?”

She poked her head in, “I just wanted to know if you were hungry.”

He kept his back to her, squaring his shoulders, “Let’s make a rule. I will come get you when I need something. How about that? Can we make that rule?”

She responded quietly, “I like to see you sometimes, to know you’re there.”

“Where, exactly, the hell else would I be?” His voice was too loud, and he knew it. The door closed. There would be sobbing on the couch that he planned to avoid.

That night he watched the autumn sun fade over the lake, the moon rise, and a bottle of cheap bourbon dwindle to almost nothing. He did not leave the office until morning, when the sun was bright and breakfast ready. Eggs, bacon, and orange juice had been laid on the table alongside a solitary place setting. It was the first night they had not slept together at the cabin. Anticipating an argument, he was surprised when Meredith said nothing and sat quietly in her rocker knitting a child’s blanket.

Michael wanted to thank her for breakfast, but the sound of the rocker built a wall of resentment that he could not climb. Hard wood to soft carpet went the wooden runners of the chair. She sped the back and forth and he ate quicker. The cabin began to feel like a rustic dollhouse. The rocking was faster now and he was nearly done with breakfast. The food helped sobriety to catch up to him. If only, he thought, I can get through the book. Everything will be normal if I can get through the book.

Stuck in thought, he did not notice the rocking stop until he heard a great gasp and thud from across the room.Meredith fell to the floor, writhing like a dying snake. She grabbed at her neck with one hand and her belly with the other.

“Hey,” he said loudly, “You alright?”

When she said nothing, he ran to her and lifted her head to stop it from bouncing against the floor. Her face was gaunt and her limbs were fragile and sinuous. A too small tank top showed off three-dimensional stretch marks and a navel that reminded him of a small fleshy rocket ship leaving the launch pad. He could see movement in her massive belly, and he noticed a black and blue Rorschach bruise around her rocket ship. He stroked her hair with helpless violence waiting for it all to stop. The writhing became periodic twitches, and the twitches became deep heavy breaths.

When she could breathe and her eyes found focus, her voice quivered a weak sentence, “I was thinking, and,” she paused to breathe, “It choked me.”

“What did?” asked Michael.

Her face screwed into a conflicted knot, and she corrected herself, “Nothing, never mind.”

“We should go to a hospital. I’ll get your coat.”

“No, no hospital.” She smiled at the visible motions in her belly and said, “It’s two hours away, by then I’ll be fine.”

Michael tried to protest, “It might be a seizure or something…”

She grabbed him tightly by the wrist, “I said no hospitals.”

To read "State of Nature" in its entirety, download Tainted Tea Winter 2011.



About Eric Victor Neagu:

Eric Victor Neagu lives, writes, and works as a sustainability consultant in Chicago. His undergraduate degree is from Purdue University in civil engineering, which he uses to redevelop former industrial areas. Eric also has a graduate degree from The University of Chicago, which he mostly uses to give driving directions to Barack Obama's house when people ask. Other work can be found in Simon Magazine, The National Ledger, Bartleby Snopes, Bewildering Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Write Place at the Write Time, A Long Story Short, The Camroc Press Review, and Hackwriters.

Brinker's Contract By Michael A. Kechula

"Brinker's Contract" by Michael A. Kechula is a weekly, four-part serial about Brinker, a bounty hunter sent to Haiti for one thing: zombies.

Part One coming this Thursday.

The Unexpected Horror: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a bleak, harrowing story of a nameless father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Though darker than Stephen King's The Stand and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend combined, you'll never find The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, categorized in the horror section at bookstores.

Like King's and Matheson's works, McCarthy creates a desolate landscape of destruction where there are "nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world." However, unlike King and Matheson, McCarthy offers no glimmer of hope and no explanation for the destruction. The world is reduced to a blackened ash, and it will never recover.

Unlike traditional post-apocalyptic horror stories, The Road has no supernatural elements. There are no zombies, no vampires. Just regular people. Regular people who have turned savage and cannibalistic, killing, raping, and eating any survivor in their path. Though these people are only seen in fleeting passages, the father and son are in constant fear of their presence. As the father and son journey south in search of a warmer climate, they stumble upon signs of the cannibals, including, "a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit."

The father and son are surrounded by despair. Conversations between the father and son are shown in quick bursts in between the blackened imagery of the landscape. "I wish I was with my mom," the son says. "You mean you wish that you were dead," the father replies. Throughout the course of the story there is an overwhelming sense of dread. The father is trying to remain strong for the sake of his son, but deep down, he knows there is no hope.

McCarthy's writing style is sparse and intense. The characters are constantly threatened by other survivors, harsh climate, and the lack of food, and as a reader, you will feel the threat, too. Each door opened may lead to a world of devestating horror, and your heart will pound every time the father "takes a look." Though the situation may be hopeless for the father and son, The Road is still worth the journey.

The Road written by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage International, 2006
287 pages