The Stranger

Tobi knew the morning would be a bad one.

The bad mornings had a different sound.

Not the sharp alarm sound, that made Lana flail and slap at the small, lit rectangle beside her bed. Or the bubbling hiss of the coffee pot that made the hot, bitter smelling drink she loved. Not the shower sound , which meant she would disappear into the bathroom and come out smelling like water and mint and bitter soap.

The bad mornings were quiet.

Tobi knew the time as cats do. By the beginnings of daylight shining through the blinds and footsteps of neighbours in the hall. He knew it by the change of his person’s breath from the easy slowness of peaceful sleep to the unevenness of waking.

He lay curled in the crook of her knee, pressed to the warmth of her body. Sometimes she would wave him away, complain when he kneaded a comfortable spot for himself to retire. But she never moved him. She thought she could mislead him into thinking she didn’t want him there but cats are too intelligent for the tricks of humans.

She lay rigid, tense beneath the thin sheets, with a hand over her forehead, fingers curled into claws. On her bad mornings, Lana stared at nothing. Of late, the nothing seemed to stare back.

He watches and waits for her to come to life. But she makes no move to shake off the haunted look in her eyes.

Trying to be gentle, he gives a questioning chirp.

Lana’s fingers twitching in response. Her eyes tear away from the ceiling and glance down at him. He cocks his head to the side and swivels his ears forward, expecting a response. She gives none.

Tobi stands, stretching languidly, and makes his way up the bed. Stepping carefully over the curve of her hip and the softness of her stomach, he stops on her chest, kneading lightly. Lana makes a soft huff as he settles there.

“You’re squishing me.”

He ignores her protests, halfhearted as they are, and stretches forward sniffing delicately at her face.

There’s no trace of the smell that she carried home days before when she returned from her disappearance. Of blood and metal and something unfamiliar that stung his nose.

She huffs a breath in his face, trying to shoo him off.

“You’re hurting me.”

But he was not. In fact he was helping very much.

He could feel it in the way her heart slowed under his ribs, at how her breaths came more evenly. Her hand moved from her face to rest on his back, fingers sliding into his soft fur.

He blinked slowly at her. A soothing purr rattling deep in his chest.

“I’m fine.”

Lana said this often. When she bumped her clumsy feet against furniture even though it always stayed where she put it. Or when she spoken into the little rectangle of light. She’s said it to her mother when she’d visited days ago.

He knew what followed the words and it was rarely good. That they meant she was not at all fine.

He bumps his head against her chin, pressing into her neck, purring louder.

For a moment everything is still and quiet again.

Then, all at once, she throws the sheets aside, toppling him onto his side in a tangle. He yowls in protest but Lana has already swung her legs over the side of the bed. Before he can extricate himself from the linen prison, she’s striding across the floor toward the bathroom.

He chirps indignantly at her rudeness as she splashes water over her face and begins to scrub gingerly at the discolouration on her cheek.

“I have an appointment, Tobi. I’ll be back soon.”

The words send a pang of anxiety through him.

She’d said them before, every day, when she left to do what humans do. He’d trusted them, until one day she didn’t return. He remembered the days spent waiting. The pangs of hunger when his bowls had run empty.

He weaves through her legs, meowing urgently that she can not leave him again.

She looks down at him with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

She tried so hard to hide it but Tobi knew the shape of her unhappiness. It made her forget things on the counters, leave the lights on all night. Sometimes she would sit so still she would turn almost invisible and her tears would make her smell of salt.

She’d been having a harder time hiding it since she brought the stranger home.

Tobi didn’t like the stranger.

He had no smell.

That was his gravest offence. Everything had a smell. His Lana smelled of coffee and soap, of paper and the metal tang of worry. The apartment smelled of dust and food and the scents he rubbed on all that was his. Even visitors brought smells from outside, of rain, dirt and fresh clean air.

But the stranger smelled of nothing.

At first, he’d snuck past Tobi undetectable without scent or shape. He’d only sensed the cold wrongness that had accompanied Lana home. It made his fur prickle and his ears twitch.

Slowly though, it had taken shape, first of a darkness where there shouldn’t be shadows. Of reflections in mirrors where nothing stood. Then a disturbance in the air, a shape that moved about a space that was supposed to belong to only them.

He stands there now, just at the edge of the room, reflected in the glass of the window. It watches her with an eerie stillness. Tobi felt a growl building up in his chest. He stood at tall as his small frame would allow, puffed his fur out on end to frighten away the intruder.

Lana starts to hush him but freezes and he knows she feels it too. Tobi takes a stiff legged step toward the shape, growling low in his chest.

How a thing without eyes can stare straight at him, he does not know, but he meets the threat wth a long, spitting hiss.

“Stop that, Tobi.” Her voice quivers. “There’s nothing there.”

Humans love to lie. To themselves more than anything.

Lana strides out of the bathroom. The strange follows.

At the door, he tries to stop her putting on her boots. Grabbing at the laces, he mewls pitifully, begging her not to go where he cannot protect her from the creature that stalks her every move.

She pushes him away with gentle hands. The pets do nothing to soothe his panic as she shrugs into her coat, opens the door, and steps into the hallway.

Tobi meows one last desperate plea as she pulls the door behind her. He can still see it there, the shadow, the presence, the stranger, as the door closes.