I tripped over the cat as I left my bedroom. Billy knows the first person to get up is the one to feed him; I guess he heard me moving around and was rubbing against the door. Anyway I opened it and stumbled out, more groggy than usual because I took sleeping pills last night, and I felt warm black fur against my ankle. Instinctively I stopped swinging my leg forward so as not to hurt him but my upper body continued its forward momentum and I fell to my hands and knees. The cat scrambled away and bolted into the kitchen, where he stood in the doorway with his back arched, looking at me as if I was some kind of nut.
I hate the smell of cat food. If I get some on my hands it makes me feel faint, and if I ever get a strong whiff of it by accident I have to run and throw up somewhere. I have been told that this must be mostly psychological and to that I say nonsense; it's all psychological. But knowing that doesn't make me not feel that way.
I held the can under the electric can opener until the lid fell inside. Balanced on top of the food, juice crept over the edges, and the juice was red like blood. I pulled open the cutlery drawer and scrabbled around for a fork. No way was I going to pull that lid out of the can with my fingers, the way I might do if it was a can of beans. I held the can at arm's length, careful not to tip it.
I stuck the tines of the fork under the sharp edge of the lid and tilted it up, then held the can over the sink and used the fork to tip the lid out. It fell into the empty sink and lay there in a pool of bloody juice. I left it there.
Crouched over the crusty cat dish, I pulled the contents of the can with the fork until it plopped out, all in one solid mass. It looked like a woman's fingers, complete with long red fingernails, all squished together into the shape of the tin. The surface of each finger was squared instead of curved, like uncooked hot dogs.
I left the empty can next to the lid in the sink for my cat-owning roommates to clean up, and headed to the bathroom for my shower. There was some kind of brown scum stuck in the drain, blocking it. I used toilet paper to wipe it away.
But after my shower, as I walked down the hallway with my towel, drying my back, I heard a grinding sound far above my head, and when I looked up all I saw was a pulsating darkness, and then something began to rain down upon me, splashing against my shoulders and landing with a wet plop on the floor. I looked at it and it was some sort of semi-masticated food, some kind of meat, maybe? I wiped it off myself with my fingers and flung it against the wall where it stuck for a second and then began to slide upwards.
With a sigh I turned around and headed back to the shower. But trying to clean myself up was impossible because the liquid that came from the nozzle was red like blood, and sticky. It stuck in the drain and grew like a clot and I pushed my toes into the drain, trying to loosen it and clear a passage. I felt something hard and dull forcing itself against my toes, and this hurt, but I couldn't pull my foot away. I was stuck, and the things that crushed against my toes were like teeth that had caught me. I felt them break through my skin and drag me deeper, and the next thing I knew I had slipped further into the drain, quickly, then slowly as narrower and wider parts of me went through. I got caught for a second by my hips, then my chest, and then I was in up to my armpits, and I flailed with my arms and tried to grab at the edges of the tub with my fingers. But I had no fingers.
Once I was pulled all the way inside I felt better. It was tight in there, with not a speck of space to shift position, but it was dark, and a sweet fatigue settled over me like a blanket and I slept, again.
I heard Billy calling for me, very loud, like an echo, but very close, like through earphones. I tried to push the sound away but I couldn't move my arms.