Westward

CW for animal death and mentions of suicide

Momma didn’t believe in these sorts of things—called them nonsense. 

Sarah did, though. Believed every word, because wives tales and whispered fables weren’t to be taken lightly. They were their own sort of magic, tangles of words snaking close and snaring with clever thorns. She’d seen it happen. Seen Johnny bewitched, seen him tighten that noose the same as a tie, wits gone to rot. 

The black cat was mangy and flea-ridden. The smell was enough to know the creature was a putrid, decomposing thing, decaying even in life. Patches of dark pelt hung from scabby skin. Ribs and hips and every notch of spine jutted out at ugly angles. A bony tail swept through the blood on the floor, leaving crimson brushstrokes in its wake. 

And those eyes. Sarah looked into those sharp eyes, a slit of the devil’s darkest night cut through piercing yellow, and that cat looked right back. It looked right back and it saw. Saw her, saw her soul and sins and everything beyond. 

Hands in cold water, Sarah stopped her rinsing and refreshing of the threadbare cloth. Raw, roughed up fingers wrung the fabric dry and set it to the side, slow, deliberate. All the while, she never broke that cat’s gaze. It didn’t break either, didn’t blink. Only sat on bony haunches and flicked that battered tail back and forth, back and forth through the blood, over the dusty floorboards. 

Scaring it off wouldn’t do no good. She’d already seen it. It’d already seen her. Instead of stomping and shooing and spitting like Momma would have, cursing out the pest, she stood from her bedside chair. It creaked when she stood and the wood underfoot creaked when she turned, back to the burning body on the bed behind her. She’d fix the cool cloth later. 

Weak breaths, ragged and rattling and loud in the silence, made her resolved. As long as they were still there, as long as a heart was still beating, a chest still breathing, she wouldn’t let this omen have its way. 

Death’s messengers, the old witch exiled to the woods called them. The rattiest, mangiest, ugliest damn cats you’d ever see, showing to warn you someone was coming, shining scythe in hand, and someone was going all the way gone. 

Sarah wasn’t letting anyone go. Not when they’d already taken Johnny, rope around his throat. Not when Emily rotted alive in her bed. Not when Sullivan blazed out in fever. Not when Mary was buried under six feet of sand and clay. 

She walked to the cat, breathing in the scent of sour sickness and dry gravedirt that clung to the creature. Resolve burned hotter than fever in her chest when she crouched down and scruffed that cat, bunching greasy coat and rashy skin in a fist. 

That black-pelted pest hissed something bone-chilling, but didn’t kick or claw or struggle. Calm, a cruel glint in its eyes, it only twisted and sunk fangs deep in the meat of her arm. Salt and copper spilled in ribbons, trickling down to her elbow, dripping down to splash in the pool of blood Momma had vomited up. She didn’t let go. The cat didn’t either.

“You’re not takin’ her.” It wasn’t a suggestion. 

Teeth in her arm, fur in her fist, Sarah descended the steps and made for the kitchen. Patchy footprints in crimson and maroon trailed in her wake. Pushing frizzy curls back from her eyes, she got to work. Their sharpest knife, their best knife in hand, she stood at the counter and pushed aside the sprouting potatoes, the shriveling carrots. 

“You tell your master to do his worst. I’m not losing anything more,” she decreed. And so help her, she’d keep her word on that. No matter the cost.

The cat ripped its jaw from her flesh and took a chunk with it when it went, swallowing with keen eyes. Gritting her teeth, Sarah watched it hiss and snarl, locked in her grip. That hiss was the last voice in the deadened kitchen. She flayed that black cat open and carved it to bits. Blood drained and dripped down the cabinets, ran along the cracks and grooves in the floor, but Sarah didn’t bother to clean it—she was too busy tossing the carcass in a pot to boil until nothing but bone and gristle remained. 

With white bandages tied tight around her arm and already soaking through, she climbed back up to the damned bedside. With stained hands, she damped the thin cloth again and set it across a burning forehead dripping sweat. With grit and nails in her heart, she listened to the rattling breaths and gunky coughs and settled in to wait.

Night passed on and morning came to with a rolling fog that dulled the pale sunlight and lapped at the window. All the way until dawn, Sarah sat vigil. Coal burning in her chest, she kept the rag cool, kept the doctor’s dwindling medicines at hand, kept watch over a fitful sleep as a livestock dog guards over its lambs. But no wolves came to snatch breath and blood from under her nose.

Momma made it another day. 

Sarah took the pot off the fire.

Mangy cat soup fed the neighbor’s squealing pigs.

No sooner had she finished lugging the soot-stained pot back to the hearth did she see a flash of shadow in her periphery. And when she turned, ice chilled her veins and a petrified heart dropped like stone to her stomach. 

A black cat perched on the dining table, sicker, uglier than the last. There was no meat on its bones, only sloughing pelt and dripping, oozing sores. One ear was ripped jagged off its skull, the tail chopped and stunted halfway. One eye was missing too, only an inflamed, infected socket, all puffy red and raw. Flies buzzed loud in a frenzy around it, others clinging in wounds and gashes, crawling up its nose and through rotted teeth into its mouth. 

Bile rose sour in Sarah’s throat. She snatched the knife off the counter. But unlike its predecessor, this putrid beast didn’t wait around to look death in the eyes. Stubby tail flicking, it jumped when she lunged. Taunting, tempting, it wove through the chair legs and bounded out the room, Sarah going right after it. If killing the last made Momma survive the night, she would take them as they came. She would gut and butcher every vile omen that dared set foot in her home. They would learn what death really meant.

Scrambling after the diseased cat, she rounded the corner and shouldered the cracked door the rest of the way open. But what she found on the other side wasn’t right. She’d just been outside. She’d just rid herself of that foul carcass at the pig yard. The town’s dirt roads were dry and deserted. 

Black cats.

Black cats. 

Black cats.

Crows gathered and perched and loomed in the boughs overhead. Broken caws broke the morning. Ragged feathers tumbled to the ground. 

And on the ground, on the road, even on her very own doorstep, black cats. Shrouded and hazy in the low-lying fog, they turned ghostly and unreal. Only sharp, glowing eyes cut through the clouds, and they saw. They saw what she did. They saw who she was denying death. They saw how they could make her hurt. 

Blood pounded in Sarah’s ears, breath stolen straight from her lungs. A terrible, terrible fear burrowed in and ate and ate and ate until all that was left was wide eyes and fraying nerves to see it all, to feel it all. 

There they all sat, oil and shadow through the town, licking over yellowed fangs, digging claws into dusty earth, flicking ears and tails and haggard whiskers. The crows cried and shouted. The flies buzzed up a storm. Even the wind shuddered through the branches and whipped the fog into eerie swirls. 

Then a single cat, the one-eared devil Sarah had been chasing, stood solemn before the rest. The world fell into silence at once. All Sarah could hear was the unsteady thump of her own heartbeat, too loud. The earth itself held its breath in anxious wait.

A single wailing yowl split the air. It split Sarah’s heart. It split the army of cats all biding their time. 

A horrible realization came to Sarah all at once. The cats broke for the houses. They went stalking and slipped in the cracks, the broken windows, the gaps under the doors. One for each person who lived there at every home as far as she could see. To foresee the swift death of them all.

She knew how Johnny must have felt now, when his good mind failed him. Her head was nothing but rot as she ran, barefoot over the dirt. Tripping over her hems, hair blowing in her eyes and her mouth, she bolted for the swarm of little devils. But what could she even do? Blind in panic, she snatched and kicked at the ones she neared, but they were faster, melting around her every assault. 

Tears burned in her eyes and burned down her cheeks. Already, coughs and gasps and dying screams broke from the rows of houses. Robbed, death had come to take what was owed. Death had come to take everything from the one who tried to cheat them. 

She never should have killed that cat.

Breathless, heaving, she fell to her knees in the dust and dirt. Through the blur of wet eyes, she watched as one by one, the cats crept from cellars and rat holes, escaping the homes and leaving dying bodies behind. Melding into one great mass, the omens marched west, to where the sun sets, to where all things end. In the span of moments, their job was done.

Digging dirt into her nails and biting her lip bloody, Sarah fought to nail her resolve to her heart and stood. And on trailing death’s messengers, she went. East withered at her back. Her town, her beginning, her Momma, all turned to ash in the wind. In a blink, in the slice of a knife, it all came crumbling down. Sunrise was no more.

All that was left was west.