“Some say stray cats bring bad luck. Others say they bring something worse.”
When I was a kid, our home was a mini petting zoo. Like, seriously. There were dogs barking in the yard, colorful canaries singing in the kitchen, guinea pigs squeaking from their cage, fish tanks bubbling in the living room, a tortoise that wandered around like it paid rent, and my favorite of them all, a brown bunny named Nikki.
Nikki wasn’t just a pet. She was my girl. Fluffy, quiet, always gently twitching her nose like she was trying to understand me. I’d spend afternoons brushing her fur, feeding her bits of carrot, or just watching her hop in clumsy little zigzags around the porch. Out of all the noise and chaos in the house, Nikki was my calm. She made things feel safe.
I didn’t like keeping her caged up all the time. She looked so sad in there. So one afternoon, just before heading out to play with my friend Andy, I decided to let her roam the house a bit. I thought she deserved a little freedom. I’d be back before dark anyway.
We were walking down the street, talking about some silly monster movie we saw the week before. Andy was mid-sentence when he suddenly stopped walking and pointed up.
“Oh my god… is that a rat’s head?” he said.
“What?” I squinted, following his finger toward our roof.
A black cat sat there, tail curling lazily, jaws clamped around something small and pink. Blood dripped from it in lazy drops. I squinted harder.
Andy took a step back. “Oh shit…wait. Is that… is that Nikki’s head?”
Time slowed.
“No,” I said out loud. But I was already running.
I remember screaming her name as I tore through the house. “Nikki! Nikki!” Her cage was empty. Of course it was. I flung open the back door. The kitchen windows were ajar. I ran outside, heart pounding, calling her like she’d come hopping back. But she didn’t.
Then I saw it: a trail of red dots across the tile floor. My breath caught.
I crouched near the old kitchen cabinet, heart hammering in my ears, and peeked underneath.
There she was. Her body. But no head.
After Nikki died, I thought that was the end of it. But that was just the beginning.
One week later, I found the guinea pigs’ cage broken open. Blood on the floor. No bodies.
The canaries started disappearing too. One morning, I found yellow feathers scattered near the sink. The cage door was wide open, even though I know I locked it the night before.
Even the tortoise went missing. That was the day my mom finally said, “No more pets.”
But the weird thing was… the cat never stopped coming.
Every room felt wrong. Every creak in the floorboards, every flutter of curtains from the breeze made my heart jump. I found myself tiptoeing through the house, peering around corners, eyes darting to dark spaces under furniture, half-expecting to see a pair of glowing eyes staring back.
I stopped sleeping properly. I started locking every window and door. Still, I’d hear them at night; soft thuds on the roof, claws scratching the tiles, a low purring outside my room. One time, I woke up and saw glowing eyes outside my window, staring right at me.
I told my mom. She said I was imagining things. “Trauma,” she said. “You miss your bunny.”
I guess that’s when my dislike for cats truly began. Maybe “dislike” isn’t even the right word, it’s more like I never trusted them. People love to say how graceful or cute they are, but all I ever saw was something sly and secretive. Like they always knew more than they let on, and none of it was good.
After what happened to Nikki, how could I ever see them the same way?
I started to suspect they didn’t just kill for food. It felt… personal. Like they enjoyed it.
A few days later, Andy dropped by again. I didn’t even hear him at the gate as I was too busy creeping down the hallway, head low, trying to catch any sound, any hint of claws scraping tile.
When I finally noticed him standing by the door, he was staring at me with a puzzled grin.
“Why are you acting so weird?” he asked, giving me a playful nudge. “What’s gotten into you?”
I swallowed hard, then pointed toward the kitchen wall. My hand was shaking.
“Don’t you see it? The cat. It’s right there. Watching us.”
Andy’s grin faded. He squinted at the spot I was pointing to, then turned back to me with a confused frown.
“There’s nothing there.”
My stomach dropped.
I spun around, scanning the kitchen, the living room beyond it, the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
Too quiet. Even for a house that had lost so many of its sounds. It hit me like cold water down my spine. The cat wasn’t on the roof anymore. It wasn’t perched on the fence or slinking through the garden.
It was somewhere inside the house. Hiding. Waiting.
And suddenly, I wasn’t sure who it would come for next.
