The Wish Belly Part I

Feb 17

A fiction serial by Shane Kimberlin

The phone rang as soon as the kettle began to whistle. There was no gap between them. They were like two boxers hitting each other’s jaws at the same moment. A violence between the sounds. I was in my bedroom folding clothes.

The noise confused me. It was not my smartphone snug in my pocket that rang, but my old landline by the stove. Di-di-di-di-di-di, it yelped as phones from the end of last century did, that noise of an electronic goat’s bleat. The kettle warbled and trilled like it always did. If there was enough water and heat in the world, that kettle would catcall until the end of time.

I walked briskly across the apartment to the kitchen but refrained from running. I yanked the kettle off the hot stove and grabbed the phone.

“Hello?” I said, searching the cupboard for a decent mug. The cat curled up to my leg.

“We want the cat.”

“Excuse me?” I found the green tea bag.

“The cat.” “I think you have the wrong number.”

“Don’t play dumb. You can’t hide forever.”

A strange pattern arose in my beating chest.

“Oh yeah? Really? I can’t hide forever, huh? I’m not hiding. In fact, you’re calling me, you know exactly where I live, and yet you can’t do anything. It’s not my problem ya’ll can’t figure out how to exist in the real world.”

“Our world is just the same as yours. Real. But enough chits-chats. I’m afraid there’s not much time.”

“Not much time for what?”

“Not for what, but whom. Her.”

“What?”

“She’s here. With us.”

I looked out through the window. Half moon. The cat purred.

“So,” the voice continued, “bring us the cat.”

“You’re sick.”

“No. We cannot be sick. You base sickness off what you inhabit. You have creatures that live in water. Is it sick you do not?”

“Where are you?”

“Three feet down beneath the cherry tree.”

Dadadadada.

“Hello?”

They hung up. I looked down on my tea, now cool enough to drink. I took a sip and looked over at the cat. He stared back, blankly, and walked towards me. I picked him up and rubbed his belly.

“I wish there was a way out of this. I wish there was a way out of this.”

There was no response. I grimaced. If the cat meowed when you rubbed his belly, things came true. But if the cat didn’t meow, you were left with chance, the way life just seemed to naturally be.

They wanted the cat because of his powers. That was my guess. Who “they” were, I didn’t quite know.

The first time I saw them was in the park near our house. Our cat had a bad habit of sneaking off in the evenings, the ways cats usually do. A cat looks at you and your world as a side hustle, a momentary stay in the grand scheme of their epic life.

She wanted me to find him.

“What if he’s gone for good?” she said.

I was cooking chicken caprese.

“He’ll be back.”

“An owl might have got him.”

“He’s gonna come back.”

“A big owl.”

I sighed and grabbed my coat.

“Watch the chicken, please,” I said. “It’s timed for eighteen minutes.”

She smiled at me like I was a hero, the last time she ever did.

The park was empty. Street lights shone on roads that moved off into darkness.

The darkness has never scared me, but that night I felt fingers playing arpeggios up my spine.

There was faint and unmistakable meow. I walked faster.

The lanes of the park lead to a center area where there were benches. It was colloquially called Grant's Eye. At one point a fountain was going to be put up, but funding ran out. Only a small plaque sat in the middle of the barren pavement, with the promise of the fountain one day. From afar it looked like a solitary eye gazing up from the earth, hence the name.

As I neared Grant’s eye the cat’s hissing grew strong. I turned the corner and there he was.

The cat stood right on top of the plaque lit by the park lamps. His eyes were different. His claws out. He hissed again. Surrounding him in a near perfect circle were five thin odd figures.

They towered over the cat at seven foot tall and were covered in elaborate gear. It looked like a hazardous material suit pressed together with diving equipment from the 1930’s. There was a rounded clear screen from which they could look through, but the only glimpses I had of their faces brought nothing to me. It was as if only their absence of a face existed, a continually shifting blur.

The cat leapt from the plaque and rushed towards me. All five figures turned and looked at us. The cat jumped into my arms.

“Hey now,” I said, “we’re just going to be going now.”

“No,” said the one closest to me, “you will be going but without your friend.”

The voice was high, warped, like the words themselves had been recorded backwards on tape, then played in reverse, but instead of gibberish there was, instead, clear language.

“I have to." I sounded apologetic.

“We’ll kill you."

My foot pivoted and I took off away from them. A roar shot out behind me, the human face of the voice unveiled to reveal a cracked skull beneath.

I ran with the cat and its belly jiggled in my hands. “Oh oh oh” I yelled to myself as my legs punched their weight. Their roar increased in volume. I could feel them behind me but I wouldn’t look back.

“I wish we’d be gone, I wish we’d be gone,” I whispered to nobody. A misshappen prayer.

All darkness came upon me and my last thought, before the last piece of light fell away, was that this was the end.

Sheer nothing lifted to reveal the front door of the apartment complex. We were there, a few blocks from the park, the cat still in my hands.

Confused, I opened the door and went inside.

“Oh, you found him,” she smiled. I nodded.

“You look pale.”

“I always look pale.”

“Even more pale.”

“Yeah.”

“Wait,” she said, “is that blood?”

She took a paper towel and wiped my nose.

“Why are you bleeding?”