Sloane Stevens simply hadn’t been born with the zest for life, and that fact remained true year after year and abandoned hobby after abandoned hobby. Nothing inspired Sloane to work or move or make dinner. Nothing, that is, except cats. From a young age, felines were the only thing that could perk Sloane up. That little spark of life Sloane felt when she met her first cat, a tabby named Ginger, had turned into a type of addiction.
That addiction had landed her here, crouched in an alley, waiting for Sylvester to reappear from the dumpster he’d run behind. Thanks to increased police presence near her apartment, and the way said police insisted that she couldn’t take any more cats home, Sloane was forced to work under cover of darkness. That would be fine, except for the fact that Sylvester was one of the most well-bred black cats she’d ever seen, and she hadn’t been able to put his bell on before her newest acquisition had made his escape attempt. But it was no matter, for Sylvester would be home safe and sound very soon.
As if she thought it into reality, Sylvester took that moment to make a break for it. Sloane was so battle hardened after ‘rehoming’ so many cats, that she barely felt his claws as she pounced and then wrestled Sylvester into submission.
“Shh, it’s okay. We’ll be home soon,” Sloane whispered to the cat as she gave him soothing back rubs.
Sloane didn’t have to dodge any police cars on her way home, which was odd. But not as odd as the silence that greeted her when she opened her apartment door. Her cats were all slumped on the floor, unmoving. Holding back tears, Sloane rushed past the ever increasing pile of unopened mail and sank to the floor next to her cats. Up close, she realized that they actually were moving, just incredibly slowly.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that every single one of her cats was suffering from the same ailment. Something must have happened while she was gone. Sloane, still holding Sylvester tightly, headed to the laundry room to check the cat food. Slipping around the mountain of laundry that she could never seem to get around to doing, Sloane pulled out the bag of cat food, peered inside and then sniffed. No alarm bells sounded, so she replaced the food with a sigh.
When she returned to the living room, the state of the cats remained the same, but a strange new smell caught her attention. It very clearly wasn’t the litter box or the old dishes in the sink, as Sloane was well accustomed to those things. No, this was something else completely. Her nose led her to the wall of water bowls, all seven of which were completely empty and smelled foul.
Without thinking, Sloane set Sylvester down in order to more easily inspect the nearest water bowl. Sylvester saw his chance and took it without hesitation, rushing in a blur of fur out the front door that Sloane had forgotten to close behind her.
“Sylvester, come back and help me investigate!” Sloane called to no avail.
“Useless cat. But don’t worry, I’ll find you again once this has all been sorted,” Sloane muttered under her breath.
Putting Sylvester out of her mind, Sloane investigated the bowls further and came to the decisive conclusion that the water was to blame for the current state of the cats. But who could have tampered with the water?
For the second time that night it was as if her thoughts had turned to reality, because just as she was trying to puzzle it out, a spaceship appeared through her kitchen window. More followed shortly after, filling the sky with a dark cloud of metal.
Sloane moved to her still open front door and peered out. The cops that were usually trying to dissuade her from loving cats were now hollering at the sky through megaphones. Or they would be, if their movements weren’t so sluggish. Apparently her cats weren’t the only creatures to fall victim to the tampered water.
Watching the events unfold, it suddenly became clear to Sloane that the aliens were responsible for the drugging. That was her answer then, and her solution.
Drawing strength from her cats, Sloane marched out her still open front door. She ignored the cops and neighbors and their stunned reactions to the imminent alien invasion. After all, Sloane couldn’t care less about the invasion, all she cared about was that these aliens had come after her cats and she would get retribution, or maybe the antidote, whichever came first.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this silly tale. It was challenging trying to get all the components of the prompt to fit into one story and still make it make sense. Did I succeed? Who knows, but it was a fun story to draft.
Head over to the Fictionistas page for more stories based on this prompt.
See you next Thursday!
I enjoyed reading this. I love that you chose not to have the protagonist stealing cats with bad intentions. Also loved the absurdity of having aliens in it.
The mother of all twists at the end. I appreciate the Crazy-Cat-Lady angle, and the out-of-nowhere Aliens to cap it off hahaha. Well done!