A young man of around twenty-five years of age walked down Hartford Avenue on a brisk saturday night in October. The Halloween decorations hanging from the doors and windows on the small family owned businesses made him smile. “It’s that time of year again,” he said to himself unable to suppress a smile. The young man had always loved Halloween because it was the one night a year that you could re-invent yourself for one night only. A sound coming from a nearby alley broke him from his nostalgic trance like nails on a chalkboard. It might have been a scream but he couldn’t be sure. People walked by him on the sidewalk seemingly unaware of any scream like noise at all. He nervously fingered the lucky rabbits foot he had gotten from a coin machine when he was fourteen. He had almost convinced himself that it was nothing when he heard it again. His luck was holding because he heedlessly crossed the street without watching traffic and got nothing more than a few honks and an offer from someone to fuck his mother. Ignoring all that he found the alley where the sound originated and was left shocked. What he saw was a man sitting elbow deep in the trash bags behind a restaurant called Dogz and Totz. The man was staring straight down what could only be the barrel of some sort of alien blaster about two inches long. At the time what he saw felt surreal but much later on he would be able to reconstruct the events with the clarity of a veteran AA member. There was a small humanoid alien that was around two feet tall with his lower half still in the fur of a tabby cat. His top half had two arms that were sitting above two vestigial looking stumps that may have been arms that were the color of ripe egg plants. His bulbous head crowned with two stubby antennae and had two large black eyes. In the time it took for him to feel his bladder release the alien shot the nan and his head disappeared in a spray of blood and chunks that plastered the wall behind him. The creature looked at the young man and pulled a hood like flap of fur that completed the tabby disguise and ran away.
When the police arrived all the young man would be able to say for years afterward was,“ It was the cat!”
