Slinky

The cat sparkled as she ran. Trace fires seemed to run from her legs and the tips of her claws as she pelted across the floor, around the feet of the table, out of the back door. The only thought on her mind was lunch, and she grinned a secretive grin to herself as she scrambled after the thing through the back garden. this one is mine, she panted through long, sharp teeth, and she ran ever the harder, her whole desperate heart and hunter’s soul fixed on the pounce and the bite and the play and the life squirming beneath her paws as she ran ran ran ran and still the thing was an inch in front of her.

She stretched as she ran, looking to close the distance to the pounce, and the thing rippled and flexed and was two inches further out of reach. The hunter’s heart quickened as the game finally became a chase proper. This was it. This was the life. This was what everything was about, the thing, the thing, the thing and her, locked together, in an instant and forever, whirling in a dance that could only end with her teeth. Locked. Around a scrawny neck. A shake, ceremonially dumping the thing before her in a heap of bloody rags. Carelessly poking it, carefully shoving it around, casually carefree… then the kill. Almost incidental, after all that. Teeth and nothing at all. Yes. Yes, please. Let it be soon. But not too soon. No no no.

She bounded faster, cutting corners, mouth slightly agape, ready. Ready. Ready. She was ready. Any second now, a mistake would be made and that would be enough. She was the ghostly hunter, the shadow killer. She played with the idea in her head, made herself out to be great, flaunted herself in the mirror of her own ego. This was her defining moment, all over again. Soft toys were one thing, but this was what she was meant for. Godlike in the chase.

And then the thing bucked and flowed and changed, right before her eyes, and was coming right at her. Her instincts were flawless. She skidded and leapt, fangs aglow in the half-light, claws extended into possibility, and the thing was made of sudden stone, frozen in grey muck, a ready snarl echoing her own, and the fish eyes and the furled wings and the ridiculous human scratchings on and around its feet somehow spoke to her. A thing, she thought, right at that last second. It’s not just a thing to be hunted, a toy. From the moment she’d first seen it, frozen grey and high on the fat human’s shelf, she’d wanted it… and then it had curled, turned, gazed at her. Expressionless, as if carved in stone, it had smiled. And it had run.

And she had filled with delight and leapt to the chase, and the game was on, and how was she to know? Truly. The stone mouth somehow gaped wider, tentacles – what is a tentacle? – flaring in triumph, and she had time to try to turn her whole body in midair, still able even at that moment to change direction, to flip on the turn of a coin, peerless hunter-killer-dancer that she was. And the bunched tentacles flared again, and an eye like the face of a coin, and behind them a beak, sharp and quick like that of a crow. And the thing made of expressionless stone grinned and hunched and leapt.

And that was all there was of that.