#0190116

The thing sitting at the end of my bed is not my cat. 

It’s not my goddamn cat, and at this point, it’s insane that no one believes me. I’ve talked to the shelter, I’ve talked to my boyfriend, and they all say the same thing. They tell me he’s always acted like that. That he’s always sat that way, and eaten his food that way. But I know that the thing on my bed isn’t Marshmallow. 

Okay, this sounds absurd, I’m sure, but I know in my gut that I’m right. 

The eyes are too human. That’s what tipped me off the first time. The pupils are too round for a cat’s. Did you know that you can apparently tell the time of day from a cat’s pupils? The smallest they get is at noon, and the largest is at midnight. This thing’s pupils take up practically all of the eye. It’s. Not. A. Cat.

It stares most of the time. Marshmallow used to purr when I pet him. This thing just stares. It looks and looks and I feel seen. 

When it’s not staring, it’s forgetting to breathe. It sits on my legs and doesn’t move at all. Like a weighted blanket is piled on my legs, but it’s so heavy that I feel like I won’t be able to get up for days. Too heavy to be a cat.

The weight is crushing.

I talked to my boyfriend about the thing that’s not our cat. We had adopted Marsh together two years ago. He was supposed to be our apartment cat, strictly indoors, but he had other plans. From what I’ve heard, Marshmallow is the father of 90% of the kittens in the neighborhood, and I still have no idea of how he got out of the apartment.

He’s always been a rowdy feline, and this thing is so so quiet. Like it’s not even trying to pretend it’s Marshmallow. Paul doesn’t notice, he says that Marsh has always acted like this, and I think he believes what he’s saying. I hope I’d be able to tell if my boyfriend was pranking me. It would be great if this was just a prank, a three-month-early April Fool’s joke. It would be great, but I don’t think it is. 

Whatever this cat-thing is, it’s got Paul wrapped around it’s pinky finger. He’s perfectly content to let it nap on his legs, and he plays with it when he gets home. I think he thinks that the stress of the job made me a little nutty. I’m five weeks into my residency at the hospital, and I’ll admit, I haven’t gotten the best sleep, but i’m not going crazy. I’m not. 

The night the thing showed up in our apartment, it was raining. Marshmallow had been outside all day and we didn’t expect him back ‘till late, but when I got home, he was right there on the edge of my bed like he’d always been there. The eyes were too wide, I could see too many bones, and before I could ask my boyfriend what this demon cat thing was doing on our bed, the thing that was not Marshmallow leaped off of the bed and scurried into another room, only to come out looking right. 

I know that most nurses have had hallucinations after long days in the ER, god knows that I have, but this wasn’t my brain, this was real, this was solid and real, it changed, like it knew i’d noticed it was off. Maybe it thought i’d chalk it up to sleep deprivation, but I saw and I know that what I saw was real. 

I think Marshmallow is dead. I mean, I kind of hope he is. That sounds awful, but I just don’t want to imagine him somewhere outside, afraid to come back home because whatever the hell is in our apartment scares him. It scares me too. I think whatever is on our bed right now killed him, and I think it wants to kill me too. 

I don’t know how long I’ve got, or if it’s playing the long game, or if I’ll even make it out of this room when I get up, but I pray to whatever God is out there, it won’t leave something like me behind after I’m dead. That it won’t drive Paul or someone else crazy with something that looks like me, but just slightly wrong.

FOLLOW-UP NOTES

- More… skinsnatching adventures, I guess. I hadn’t considered the possibility of these monsters targeting animals instead of humans, but it’s clearly not impossible.

- It’s interesting to note that while most creatures of this nature tend to be able to mask their true identity, there’s always at least one person who notices that something is off, if not wrong entirely.