It Was Never Looking at Me

The Mourning Hall

It was past two in the morning when the wind rose like a beast unchained, clawing at the trees until their twisted shadows sprawled across the windows like veins of the dead.

Lightning bled intermittently through the sky, casting pale and sudden illuminations upon the mourning hall, where silence pressed against the walls like something alive.

I sat alone before the altar.

The dim light above me buzzed with a nervous pulse, its trembling glow unable to banish the suffocating dark.

The portrait of the deceased hung still yet I could not shake the unsettling notion that the expression had shifted, ever so slightly. The corners of the mouth, perhaps. A narrowing of the eyes. As if, somewhere between dusk and this cursed hour, it had learned to look back.

Then came the sound.

A soft, deliberate scratching too steady to be wind, too faint to be human issuing from beneath the table where offerings lay untouched.

I did not move. I did not breathe.

And from the gloom, it emerged:

A black cat, drenched and silent, its matted fur clinging like a funeral shroud. Its eyes, two phosphorescent stones, locked onto mine with unnatural intent.

It uttered no cry, no purr only stared, as if in recognition.

Yet we had never kept a cat.

In my grandmother’s voice, memory stirred:

If a cat leaps over a coffin, the soul will not rest.”

The cat growled low and guttural. Not the cry of a frightened animal, but the grim murmur of warning. Then, with unbearable slowness, its head turned—not toward me, but toward the coffin behind.

A sound, sharp and sickening, cracked the stillness:

The coffin lid… shifted.

And in that moment, I knew:

The cat’s gaze had never been meant for me.

It was watching something rise