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What is your philosophy on 'an eye for an eye' and 'to forgive divine'?
Fate gave me five minutes to ponder it, across the table from a man that ended a life, and upended mine.
It started with a dream.
***
I was hunched in my large brown armchair, reading a newspaper; a normal activity, like a scene in a Rockwell painting.
Something felt flawed, similar to the moment I went upstairs, and upon reaching the top, forgot why.
I surveyed the living room.
The perfectly aligned covers on the armrests are abnormal. They are never in place, and are normally wedged in the cushion, under the chair, or hiding on the floor somewhere else until the vacuum finds it and makes a high pitched whine.
The lack of outside noise was a problem; no hum of passing cars, or birds, or wind on the windows. The inside was also eerily silent, like the calm before a storm.
In my hands was the biggest and most obvious issue, the newspaper; I haven't held one in three years.
A flash of movement caught my attention. I looked up, but couldn't find the source in the 'open concept' room.
My RCA flatscreen was angled in beside the window, and the front door in the adjoining hall was closed and locked. Everything in the kitchen was in its proper place.
I glimpsed motion to my left and saw the tip of a brown tail. It entered a haze that blurred the staircase, like a person diving into water.
The hair on my arms rose, and my breathing increased as if I've had a brisk walk.
I put down the newspaper, quietly got out of my leather perch, and climbed the stairs.
The squeaks on step three and four are absent, as if they had been oiled; however, all of these house anomalies were now minor, trumped by the tail that swung like a pendulum as he walked upstairs.
That hypnotically swinging appendage belonged to our tabby Jynx, who should be decomposed by now.
I was compelled to follow it down the dreadful hallway, tastelessly wallpapered with small pink roses and green leaves. I had ripped them out and painted the wall twenty years ago when it was already mercifully out of style.
I recalled that project; the wallpaper had been cemented on, so that the one hour task of removing the sheets turned into a three day, mind numbing prison term.
I watched the tail whip around the doorframe of Kelly's bedroom.
I came up with some explanations for Jynx's tail after a seven year absence; a ghost, a clone, or even a feline zombie. I could have assumed it was a stray cat, but didn't.
I entered the room.
Jynx was perched in the middle of Kelly's bed, licking his paw as if it was an ice cream cone.
He jerked his head in my direction, and glared at me with big owl-like eyes that said "who the hell are you?"
I walked to the bed and sat down beside him. He watched my movements closely, as if I could turn into a dog at any moment.
I waited for him to arch his back like a slinky, and then hiss and spit.
Instead, he stood, yawned as if bored, and then stretched like a pulled piece of chewed gum. His back sagged in the middle like the bottom of a roller coaster.
Jynx sprang back to a normal cat shape, then, ambled to me, nestled in my lap, and closed his owl eyes.
