Short Story: Easy Prey

The Great Substack Prompt Celebration

To stretch my short fiction muscles, I’m taking part in Fictionista’s Great Substack Prompt Celebration. This month’s prompt included a slacker who steals cats, something beautiful but useless and something wrong with the water.

---

Easy Prey

I smell them before I see them. A tender scent that grips my nose and tugs me forward: sweat-damped fur, hay and dung, the tang of fear. Prey. Food.

Stalking through the grass, I keep my rumbling belly low, my ears pricked for movement as their musk of terror grows stronger.

But every time I close in, they run and my hunt begins anew.

The scream of the telephone wakes me. Another dream-feast interrupted.

Let the phone shriek. I suspect it’s only Kathy Parker, asking me if I’ve seen the family cat, Mr. Whiskers. “Caroline, my youngest, is so distraught,” she’d cried yesterday, appearing on our front porch waving a ‘Lost Pet’ flier. “You’ll let us know if you see him?”

I promised I would keep an eye out. Later, I shredded the flier and used it as cage liner for Mr. Whiskers and his feline brethren; litter is expensive and the cats are never here for long.

Sure enough, Kathy’s shrill pleas ring out again on voicemail, which I delete immediately. It’s just a cat, for God’s sake. Some of us have to eat, and here in the suburbs, prey is scarce. Squirrels, small dogs and pampered house cats.

I heave myself off the couch and switch off the soap opera I was watching when I fell asleep. There’s a thin line of blood down my pajama pants, and a hole in the elbow of my favorite sweatshirt, scars from my battle to the death with a mangy tabby this morning. Time for a bath before John gets home. 

My husband likes fresh meat, but he doesn’t like any evidence of death hanging around. When he arrives home, just after 6, he’ll expect a steaming roast, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and a chilled beer, with no blood, bones or fur in sight. He likes me with lipstick and perfume, not bared teeth and the sweat of the chase. Every night, I must turn myself from a huntress into something beautiful but useless, a woman made for serving drinks and dinner and asking, “How was your day, honey?”

Then he’ll complain, of course, about how tough the meat is, how it tastes of sour milk and old fish. But he’s the one who wanted to move here. Fresh air, a yard with a picket fence, excellent schools. The perfect place to raise children one day. I can’t do that right either.

I’m upstairs in my bathrobe, watching the faucet dribble a last slow trickle of hot water, when the doorbell chimes. And chimes again. And again. Goddamnit Kathy, it’s only a cat.

Snarling, I stalk downstairs and open the door, ready to pounce.

An apple-cheeked young man in blue coveralls smiles at me through the screen door. “Uh, Hi, Mrs. Parker? I’m from Carson Plumbing,” he points ostentatiously to the red pipe logo over his heart. “You called about problems with your dishwasher?”

“I didn’t call a plumber,” I grumble. “Mrs. Parker lives at 1122 Hunter’s Lane. This is 1122 Hunter’s Circle.”

His toothpaste-ad grin falls. “Oh, my apologies, ma’am. I’m new in town and still learning my way around.”

His gaze flicks over my loosely tied robe and bare legs. He’s hungry, like all men, but he does a decent job of hiding it, his polite smile returning as he waves goodbye. “Well, I won’t take up anymore of your time. Thanks for the help.”

He jogs down the steps and back to his truck with easy athleticism. His coveralls are loose, but they outline broad shoulders and strong thighs. Here’s a man with plenty of muscle. I wonder: Are his calves as meaty as his plump derriere?

Stomach growling, I push open the screen door. “Actually, while you’re here…”

The plumber, who introduces himself as Buck, follows me as meek as a lamb up to my bathroom. Mouth pursed in a pensive frown, he looks over the spigot of my half-full bath tub. “And you say there’s something wrong with the water?”

I step closer, silently unsheathing my claws. Saliva fills my mouth, but I hold my growl in check, my voice low and sweet. “Uh-huh. It never gets hot enough.”

The plumber dips in one taut forearm, a gazelle drinking at a pool. “Seems warm enough to me.”

He looks back at me with wide, dark eyes, fringed with translucent gold lashes. Doe eyes. Poor Buck. When I bare my teeth, he freezes, like they all do, just before the wolf leaps.

Slick tile. Steamed mirrors. A wrong step. Bathrooms are such treacherous places. He falls easily, his mouth a tender O of surprise. I lick the trickle of blood at his temple. Delicious.

***

“The roast was perfect tonight,” John says, wiping his mouth. “So tender.”

“Thanks, hon.” I take our dishes to the sink, pack up the leftovers, do all the tidying up while John turns on the TV news. I half listen with alert curiosity, though I parked the plumber's van back at his office with the keys inside. Just another young buck who walked off the job on the first day, or left for work, and never made it home for dinner. Happens all the time.

After John falls asleep in front of the TV, I creep into the basement with a bowl of scraps.

Mr. Whiskers, Bootsie, Tiger and the midnight black stray I caught yesterday mewl for attention, for food, for love. When I open their cages, they don’t snarl or bite. They don’t hunt. Domesticated into meekness, they eat the leftover rump roast from my hands.

Perhaps I’m becoming domesticated too, I worry. There are some in my pack who would say I was slacking off, becoming a scavenger and forgetting how to truly hunt.

But if John and I ever have children, they’ll need to be fed, not just to hunt. They’ll need easy prey, more than cat meat and squirrels.

The doorbell rings. Those Amazon drivers are always so prompt.