Pests

I have a black cat.

I picked her up from the parking lot of my local Dairy Queen as a kitten, and I had to quickly get used to the sound and commotion she made in the night. I laugh at myself when I think back to when I first got my cat and I used to get up several times a night because I thought I someone had broken into the apartment. I would sneak down my hallway my hand would cover my heart as icy dread spread over my skin, seeing two round eyes reflected green in the dark.

"You scared me," I used to tell my cat in a breathy laugh, reaching to pet her while she happily rolled around, paws wrapped around my forearm, the very tips of her sharp kitten fangs grazing my arm as she gave me playful nips.

She always loved to sleep on top of the kitchen cabinets and take her favorite stuffed mouse toy to the top of my bookcase to hoard—and I had to stretch on my tiptoes to get it down for her, slapping my hand against the printed-wood melamine until the fuzzy mouse was under my palm.

"Why can't you get back up here and get it yourself?" I asked my cat every time, and she always answered by purring and rubbing against my legs, her round eyes shining with an intensity that used to unsettle me.

We just moved into a tiny little house in an even smaller town, just me and her. When we passed the local Dairy Queen on the way in, the only restaurant for miles in either direction, I jokingly asked, "Look familiar?"

She answered with a sad, subdued meow from the cat carrier in the backseat.

Our first day in the new house, wind whipped against the windows and howled in ways she'd never heard, but she didn't seem bothered by it. I tried to make progress unpacking, but sitting on the cracking leather of the recliner the previous owners had left behind and watching TV was too tempting.

All evening, from the corner of my eye I saw my cat looking intently at one spot in the wall. Her black tail jerked and her pupils dilated, but she stood perfectly still on the arm of my chair and stared.

I tried not to acknowledge the pit of dread in my gut at what she might see.

My window shaking above my head woke me up in the middle of the night and I shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of water, squinting sleepily and trying not to knock my knees into the short table in the hall. In the back of my mind, I wondered how long it would take to get used to this new house.

I got water from the sink faucet and drank it down in a continuous gulp. I wiped my mouth and sucked in a breath that turned into a yawn, and the skin on the back of my neck prickled as something moved beside me.

My head turned so fast that a pinched nerve lit a lighting bolt of pain in my neck. My face wrenched against the sensation, but I forced my eyes open and a cube of ice lodged heavily in my chest.

Two green circles shone at me eye-to-eye in the dark.

"You scared me," I whispered, the ice cube melting through my limbs and my heartbeat pumping hot in my ears. I reached out my hand and my cat stretched out from atop the microwave to headbutt it, trilling happily.

"I looked up why your eyes shine, you know," I said, scratching her absentmindedly. "You have a layer of tissue in your eyeballs called a tapetum lucidum that allows you to see at night. That way you can stay up and run around and make noise all night."

As if to agree, her purring got louder.

"A lot of animals have it, but humans don't. I wish I did, then maybe you wouldn't scare the shit out of me all the time."

Another big gust of wind shook the house, and I looked towards a foreign rattling noise at the back door. I sighed, watching the dog door tremble open and shut, the duct tape the previous owners had used to seal it shut peeling up at the edges.

I told myself it was a problem for another day. My cat pawed at my hand to keep petting her, but I told her goodnight and went back to bed.

The next day, I got up and my cat was already pacing back and forth at the foot of my bed. Living in a new house didn't change her strict morning routine. I swung my legs off the bed and winced at the cold wood floor creaking under my feet.

She pranced to the kitchen, making small sounds of anticipation. I followed behind her, slopped some fishy-smelling mush from the can into her bowl, and brewed myself some coffee. I leaned against the cabinet and looked into the living room, jaw clenching and unclenching as my eyes met the spot in the wall where my cat had been focusing all night.

Before I had a chance to pour my coffee into my mug, my cat raced to the bookcase, met my eye from across the room, and meowed at the top of her lungs.

"Again?" I asked, grimacing.

She kept meowing, adamant and urgent, and I reached up to aimlessly pat my hand across the top of the bookcase.

"Got it," I said in triumph as I touched something soft, but as I closed my fingers around the form, my stomach sank.

I jerked my hand back and looked at my fingers, gooey and wet with dark blood.

The form fell from the bookcase to the hard ground in front of me with a wet smack and my eyes squeezed shut, the sound turning my stomach.

A taupe field mouse lay on the ground, stiff and cold, its fur miry with dried, caked blood. Its stomach was lacerated and raw, and when I realized that what I'd touched was a mouse's insides, a wave of nausea overcame me and I ran to the sink to scrub my hands.

My cat followed me with the dead mouse dangling in her mouth like a toy.

"Put it outside!" I snapped at her, flinging water across the counter as I pointed to the back door.

I watched my cat paw open the dog door and set the mouse outside with another viscerally wet sound.

She mewed at me from the back door and I sighed. I hadn't realized there was a mouse problem in the house, but I should have with how rural the new place was. It struck me that she'd probably heard them in the walls the night before.

I was disgusted. I didn't think I had a weak disposition to dead animals after years of hunting and cleaning deer in cramped little shacks with too-little ventilation for relief from the smell, but touching mouse guts first thing in the morning wasn't something I'd bargained for.

At least she was helping take care of the pests.

The banging of the dog door in the wind woke me up the second night, and I groaned into my pillow. Of all the tasks in my long to-do list unpacking and situating in the new house, my brain had skipped the most annoying one. I got out of bed, dodged the table in the hall, and stopped dead in the kitchen.

Dread bathed me in ice.

Two lamplight green circles shone at my eye-level, two pin-dot eyes reflected just underneath them.

"Another mouse?" I asked into the darkness, and wrinkled my nose when I heard an agonized squeak, nearly drowned out by the wind. I crouched at the dog door and tried to stick the worn-out tape back into place, but it did nothing.

I hung my head. My cat needed a place to put the dead mouse when she was done with it anyway.

"Just don't go out there," I said to her through the dark, trying not to hear a crunch and another frantic squeak, and feeling glad that I couldn't see anything. "You'll get picked up by an owl or a coyote."

I went back to bed and reminded myself not to reach up blindly to the top of the bookshelf the next day.

It soon felt normal, being in the new house with my cat. She handled the pests and only rarely left their gored bodies where I had to see them, usually discarding them out the dog door onto the back porch—and I learned very quickly to look where I was stepping over the threshold to the back porch, hearing a wet crunch and having to hose off tiny bones and organs squished between the tread of my boots one too many times.

I blamed the vile images of those crushed bodies for the insomnia that started to torment my nights at the new house. Every time I fell asleep, I woke with a gasp like I'd forgotten how to breathe, and I held my hand close to my face to watch the faint outline shake in the dark. I got out of my bed to clear my mind, and as I got my glass of water in the dark house, I tried not to pay attention the guttural growls from my hunting cat or the primal desperation from her victims.

I heard the dog door open and shut again a few times a night, and I never knew which times I was dreaming and which times I wasn't. The grisly mice and bird corpses weren't on the porch anymore in the mornings, and that was fine with me. I didn't really question whether my cat was eating them or discarding them somewhere further away from the porch, because even if she was going out at night, she was still in my room every sunrise, eager for breakfast.

I saw two sets of reflecting eyes one night, and I couldn't tell which pair were my cat's, they were the same size. I listened through the pumping of my anxious pulse as my cat dragged the other animal out the flap, but I never saw the body of what it was.

Another night, I heard distressed flapping of wings through the dog door that seemed too loud to be a sparrow or a cardinal, and the glimpse I caught of the glowing eyes seemed big enough to be an owl.

On a particularly bitter winter night, I woke up so many times from shallow sleep that I couldn't tell which times I was actually conscious. I dreamt of growling and whining, and I went into the kitchen in the morning a hazy shell.

I passed by the back door the first time without seeing anything. But on my way back to my room, I caught it in my peripheral vision and I jumped. Hot coffee sloshed over my hand and splashed to the ground and I stared in stunned silence,

A head hung through the dog door, lifeless with half-lidded eyes. Viscous blood clumped into tawny fur, long jaw baring blood-soaked canines dangling to the ground by only a piece of ripped flesh.

My cat chirped from atop the microwave, looking at me too directly, intensity in her green eyes.

"How—?" The question died in my throat. My hand stung and blistered from the burning-hot coffee, but I stood in place and gaped at the dead coyote head sagging through the dog door into my house.

Before I moved to the tiny house in the middle of nowhere with my cat, I'd never imagined I would have to hoist a coyote's body from my back porch and haul it away, just far enough to get it out of sight and hope that the vultures would take care of the rest for me.

When I walked up the driveway to my front door, I felt my cat staring at me from the front window, but I couldn't bring myself to meet her eye.

She's an eight-pound little animal, I told myself throughout the day when she would cross my path and rub on my leg and headbutt my hands for pets and the image of the coyote's shredded throat played in my head. She can't hurt you.

I spent the evening on edge, fingernails picking at the recliner's peeling leather, my cat perched on the arm, staring at one spot on the wall. I reminded myself that she only takes care of pests, only pests, and I went into a restless sleep.

In the morning, I could've cried with relief when I nearly stepped on a dead mouse—just a mouse—on the back porch.

The days passed, and if I hadn't had to pass the decaying coyote every day on the way to work, I would've convinced myself that that whole morning was just a dream.

The wind beat against the house and I awoke with a start to the sound of the back door flying open.

I left my bed and tripped over something hard and metal in the dark hallway. I squinted to see what it was and I furrowed my brow. I didn't remember getting out my shotgun anytime recently. Maybe I'd started sleepwalking. I hoped not.

The back door was cracked and the wind whistled through the gap, high-pitched and harsh. I stiffened against the frigid winter air, looking back across the ink-dark house, worry churning in my gut that my cat had run out into the cold, dangerous night.

I saw her green eyes reflected in the dark and I sighed with relief. I shut the back door and deadbolted it.

I heard my cat growl low and menacing in the base of her throat, and I wondered if she caught another mouse, since I'd only seen one set of the traffic-light eyes in the dark.

I stood at the back door for an extra second, thinking to myself how much louder the wind was here than in the city. It drowned out my cat's teeth piercing flesh, dulled down the trashing and gurgling of something so much bigger than her.

"Please, please, I'm sorry, help me, please—"

I yawned into my palm and my eyes trained on the shape of the gun in the hallway. I fell asleep to the sound of the wind against the windows and not cries for help from the kitchen.

I thanked my cat for taking care of the pests.