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eBook Category: Horror/Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: A strange phenomenon, a purple sky, has blighted the township for miles around. It is the darkest, coldest time in a bleak winter. Snow falls heavily, and the last survivor is a man in an abandoned farm house surrounded by the walking dead. Those neighbors who survived, and their dogs and other animals, have all fled. Only a few abandoned cats are left, and now they come seeking food. The man is all alone, trapped in his dilapidated farm house, and he doesn't want the cats to leave or to starve. He realizes he must go down into town, all alone, and face the horror that stalks the streets. But there is worse to come.

eBook Publisher: Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine), Published: Far Sector SFFH, 2004
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2004

19 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [29 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [45 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [14 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [197 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [15 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [75 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [87 KB] , hiebook (KML) [73 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [65 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [13 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [16 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [52 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [25 KB]
Words: 4800
Reading time: 13-19 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Everyone I ever loved owned a cat.

I'd never thought about it until recently, now that I'm the only human left at the "Crumble-Down Farm," as the local children once called it.

My mother, difficult but always there for me, had an orange tabby named Charlie who seemed to be living his first life in a feline incarnation. She had to lift him up onto windowsills because he wasn't sure how to jump, and I once saw him fall off a table and land on his side. How he loved her, too. He was a marmalade shadow always at her side, even, she told me, keeping her lap warm while she sat on the toilet.

And Benjamin was my father's obese, white, deaf cat who shed rugs weekly and kept his tongue sticking out stiff as a little pink depressor. Benny was an affectionate, stupid animal who never used his claws on anything, not even furniture. He liked to play with grapes.

There are so many more I could name, each different than the next, cats belonging to my best childhood friend, my aunt Willa, both my grandmothers. And Joy's cat Winston.

She was a little Tonka truck of a cat with a thick African wildcat tail, and skin missing on her flank where some cruel boy had thrown hot tar. Everything about Winnie was round--marble green eyes, neckless head, paws. When Joy and I would leave her alone too long, she'd grow angry and swipe at our feet and shins upon our return. But then she'd curl up with us later in Joy's bed, making our warmth sweeter with purring.

These trivial details are so important to me here in the attic. I roll them round me like a kitten with balls of yarn, trying to lose myself in the unwound threads of lost lives. If I stare at the snow that's fallen through the roof, I see the cats so clearly like pictures projected on a white screen.

Everyone I ever loved is gone.

They were in town at The Egg Festival when the blue sky was overwhelmed by an infinity of stunning purple. An impostor sky.

A stomach virus saved me from this plague. I was home sick at the farm and saw it through my window. It moved like a time-elapsed movie of an approaching storm, abnormally quick and arching itself over the horizon until there was just a glowing purple above the world. It shone bright as sunlight, but the sun was nowhere in sight. It only lasted a few days but was so immense it seemed years from end to end. It brought cold with it too, and that first day was like January in Maine. When it left I heard dogs howling all over the countryside, then the howls got dimmer and dimmer. They left for some other dog place.

But the cats stuck around.

The farm is so quiet. I like that. The old gray wood doesn't creak, it's so pliant and spongy beneath my heavy steps. It makes me feel I could lay my head anywhere and sleep, as if the whole place is one great bed. I'm on the highest hill in the county with a view of the land all around. There are plenty of trees around the house, and overgrown grasses in the summer, to make me feel far from civilization. The nearest town is five miles away. I don't know if anyone lives there any longer. There's a highway close, but it never bothered me. It sounded like the ocean.

Last month was November. After the impostor sky left and the blue returned, the leaves died. I let them fall and pile up all over the yard, flakes of red, orange, green and yellow, like the down of an enormous tropical bird. One day at sunset, I sat on the back porch in great-grandmother's rocker, listening to the zombies complain down in the valley. I watched the leaves shiver, the trees scrape back and forth. And then I saw a small white and black cat I'd spotted around a lot, walking funny along the tree line fifty feet away. As my eyes followed him I realized he hobbled because he was missing one back leg.

It must've come off in a fox trap.

He disappeared behind a log pile without looking over his shoulder.