Cat Box

Ana leaned over the back of her couch as she gazed out the window of her apartment. She enjoyed watching the tiny cars and tiny people far below. The noises of the busy city were barely a faint echo by the time they reached her window.

It was cathartic, the removed sense that the distance provided her, the illusion that the people and cars were so tiny. It was like saying all their stressful energy and busy aggression was something that could be gently patronized, dismissed as nothing but a game of pretend, a grand dramatic play with no audience.

She swished the wine in her glass like she'd seen people do on TV and only managed to spill a bit on the top of her couch.

A stack of unopened mail sat on her table. She would put off opening the bills as long as possible. She didn't need that sort of dark voodoo cursing the tranquility of her night.

Besides the bills, there were a few pieces of junk mail in the stack, scummy offers, promises of loans with little interest, fake coupons, oh, and the package.

There was a small package wrapped in brown paper next to the bills and junk mail. Unlike the envelopes, it had been hand delivered.

It had come to her at work that day, right in the middle of business hours at the doctor's office where she ran the front desk.

It had been delivered by a man she hadn't seen in over a decade.

Her uncle had always been a portly, unkempt man who put little effort into his appearance. But, that afternoon when he had burst into her work holding the package, the grey in what hair he had left, the bags under his eyes, visible despite his dark circular spectacles, the bulge of his gut from stress eating, it was like he'd aged twenty years instead of ten.

He'd been frantic, paranoid.

His beady eyes couldn't seem to sit still. As he spoke he paused to look over his shoulder between each shaky sentence he uttered.

He'd asked, begged, and insisted that she take the package, claiming that there would be consequences which would 'sweep across us all' if they got their hands in it.

When Ana was about to ask if the red still wet liquid spotting the package was blood, he had already turned on his heels with the intent of fleeing the building. He tripped twice before making it out the door. The second time his glasses had gone flying off of his face.

He hadn't even bothered to grab them.

It had been a tense few moments after he left, as the waiting room full of patients sat quietly staring at her and the package.

"Thank you uncle, for returning my box of sex toys!" She'd called after him as she set the box behind the counter.

Every pair of eyes in the room swiveled from her and the box wrapped in brown paper to the floor or to the screen of their phones.

Ana.

Her uncle had been one of the few people who'd called her Anabeth when she was a child.

She took another sip of her wine. It had made her feel... just a bit less common, less plain, less ordinary.

She looked at her low end apartment, at her split ends badly needing a trim, poked her largest toe through the hole that had been long worn into the bottom of her house slippers. Her stomach sank a bit as she admitted to herself that she was an Ana, not an Anabeth.

The second and third glasses of wine disappeared as she read a new horror book she'd recently purchased, Delorian's Web. It centered upon her most reactive 'fear-fetish', as she liked to call it, spiders.

After having to be sedated as a screaming child so that one could be removed from her ear canal, she had been terrified of spiders ever since.

It was Saturday night. The office was closed in the morning.

When she got up to open another bottle of cheap grocery store booze, she found herself eyeing the package as she succeeded in getting as much wine in her glass as on the table.

As she bent over hastily and sucked the wine from the wood, she knew before she finished that she was going to open the package.

Whenever her mind contemplated her uncle's sudden appearance, up until that point, she had only wondered what he'd gotten himself into and who was looking for him and his package.

Should she be worried?

Was she in danger just by possessing it?

She hadn't actually wondered what was in the package until that very moment.

She reached down with her free hand, trailing the package's paper as she wiped the wine from the corner of her mouth with the other.

What had he said, something about there being 'consequences' if they found it?

Ana tore the corner of the brown paper a little.

Was there something inside that could hurt her?

No, he would have warned her if that was the case... right?

As she thought, her hands worked autonomously, tearing the paper and loosening the twine.

She found herself gazing at what appeared to be a twelve by twelve wooden box. It was a dark wood with simple designs carved at the edges and center of each side. A small metal latch kept the top lid closed.

She considered the possibilities of what might be inside. If she was in a movie, it could be drugs or ill-gotten money.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Ana thought about how much breathing room ten or twenty grand would give her. She sighed with the imagined relief... even drugs would be nice.

'No,' she decided. She would rather have money.

But, it couldn't be money. That wouldn't make much sense. Her uncle had said something about there being consequences for everyone if they got their hands on it.

She couldn't imagine how whatever amount of money could fit in the box, could cause much of a ripple in the grand scheme of things.

She undid the little metal latch at the front of the box and cracked the lid.

She gasped at the sight of the tightly wrapped wad sitting neatly in the box.

Hesitantly, she picked it up. Soon, she had the rubber band off and was counting the hundreds into thousand dollar stacks.

Fifteen thousand.

A chill crawled up her spine.

What were the odds?

How could her uncle be in so much trouble over fifteen thousand dollars?

She glanced back to the box. She assumed the lid had fallen shut ... she hadn't closed it.

She took another sip from her fourth glass, pondering what she should do.

Maybe there had been a clue, a message scrawled on the inner walls of the box. Her focus had been preoccupied by the stack of cash when the lid had first opened.

When she cracked the lid again, her hand fell away, shaking.

Lying at the bottom of the box was a folded slip of paper.

Ana was beyond certain that it had not been there when she'd grabbed the money... but, it had to have been... there was no other possible explanation.

She unfolded the slip of paper. On its surface was scrawled the nigh illegible handwriting of a portly, nearsighted, eclectic scientist.

Dear Anabeth,

I entrust this to you, not because of your intelligence or proclivity for wise decision making. I entrust this box to you because of a specific and unique quality, one I observed in you when you were a child.

A mind that never strays to darkness, an eternal optimist, this may be the necessary prerequisite for using the box without utter disaster.

It would be too dangerous to outright say what the box is. That would make it too easy for them to find you.

But, remember that the quantum world does not follow the same rules as ours.

I leave you with this.

What if there was a way to direct collapsing potential? What if we found a way to choose whether the cat was dead or alive? What if we could choose whether it was even a cat?

Ana set the note on the table.

he box's lid was closed again.

The eternal optimist... if asked, she would have said that her first real boyfriend out of college had beaten that out of her over the course of their two year relationship.

Perhaps, if she was really feeling up to sharing she then would have gone on to say that the one after him had squirted the crumbling remnants of that optimism all over the chest of that whore he'd cheated on her with.

Ana considered the possibility that she was being pranked.

But who would want to prank her?

Why?

How?

She still wasn't ready to believe it. It could somehow be a prank, a hidden camera show.

"On tonight’s episode, dumb woman believes she has a magic box!"

The note and the money, she could have just guessed. It was unbelievable, improbable, but possible.

Her gaze fell to her horror book sitting open on her couch. That would prove it. She'd think of something that she would never think of, something she'd never want.

She reached for the box, unafraid, certain that nothing would happen.

Mostly certain.

She cracked the lid, and when nothing happened she sighed in relief, swinging the lid fully open.

They came out of nowhere, an endless swarm of ebony spiders. Each of their bodies was easily the size of her palm. In an endless tide they poured from the box. She could see them, see how they materialized from the box's bottom, from nothing.

It wasn't a prank.

She kicked the table, and backed away, her heart hammering, her breath in rhythm, matched the panting of an overheated dog.

Her kick had knocked over the wine and sent the box rolling off the table, hitting the floor. The lid closed as it rolled, ceasing the endless stream of spiders.

They spread out on the floor and soon coated the walls and ceiling. There were hundreds, probably thousands. She could hear them scurrying and clicking all around her.

In a full state of panic, her vision turning white, her hands trembling like an ill-balanced washing machine, she dove for the box.

She needed something, anything, something that would get rid of the spiders. There were spiders everywhere. She needed something that would eat them, devour them all.

She opened the box and it came lurching out.

It was too big to fit in the box, so it had to squeeze its way out.

It screeched and yowled as it struggled to birth itself.

It was covered in orange tabby fur. Its head possessed eight eyes, all with the vertical pupils of a cat. Instead of a spider's mandible, in its place hung two cat arms, each ending in a paw. Its body was segmented into two distinct parts, a head and a swollen abdomen.

It possessed eight legs, each shaped like a spider’s, but soft and fleshy like a cat's body and covered in thick orange fur.

********

The smell of cat shit hung heavy in the apartment.

Anabeth had no idea how long she'd been on the couch, facing the back, curled in the fetal position.

The spiders had left her alone, but that was because the cat had already eaten most of them.

The ceiling, the corners of every room, the threshold, her front door, all were covered in a heavy reeking web.

She didn't move as she heard the purring, felt the vibrations up against her back. She didn't move when she felt its cat-arms mandible batting at her ponytail.

She didn't move when it began to roll her in its web.

Soon, she couldn't move as she was trapped in a silky straight jacket, a cocoon that reeked of cat shit.