After the incident with the copier, coworker, and 12 gallons of india ink, I was out of a job. Liz suggested that I get out of town, and I’ve always wanted to try backpacking.
“I’m a take charge kinda guy,” I said to myself as I set out along the trail. I first noticed something was off while taking a squat. I saw no one but could feel eyes on me.
As I neared my campsite, I noticed streaks of red on a few trees. It looked like marinara sauce, perhaps spilled by a clumsy forest chef, but surely that was just my imagination. It was probably blood.
I woke up in the middle of the night, awakened by the deep purr of some animal. I was frozen, but not in fear; my ass was cold. I pulled myself back into my sleeping bag and tried to get back to sleep, doing my best to ignore the chittering around my tent.
The next day as I made my way along cliff outcrops I saw vultures circling something down below. I spotted a smear of blood on the ledge a little ways down from me.
Feeling curious, I decided to get a closer look, and I gingerly made my way down the rock face. As I approached, the vultures gulped down a last bite before leaping into the sky like cats.
The blood was all over, staining the rockface a grisly red. For a moment I felt sick, but then I noticed the shattered pyrex catching the sunshine. Then I caught a whiff of marinara. It wasn’t a deer carcass; it was a deer casserole. That’s when I noticed orange fur on my pants.
I settled in at the next campsite still shaken from the casserole on the ledge. What sicko would waste a perfectly good dinner like that.
All afternoon I heard something skittering just outside my line of sight.
I tried to get some sleep, but I felt uneasy. I must have dozed off as I woke with a start, in complete darkness, to the rancid stench of marinara invading my tent.
“SMACKO!” — something hit the tent, something that was circling me. It didn’t look big. I gathered my courage; I was bigger than it, I would scare it off.
“Guck!” I shouted as I unzipped the tent. The creature was like nothing I ever could have expected. Its wide eyes stared into mine, transfixing me.
An orange cat, but something was wrong with it. It blurred my vision, seeming to fade in and out of reality, like it wasn’t totally solid.
“It’s Monday the 13th.” He purred, his yellow upper lip curled into a smile, showing his long, white, human chompers. “Where’s my lasagna, Jon?” It was speaking to me not through words, but directly into my head. We had an unnatural telepathic link or maybe I was going crazy.
Liz picked me up the following afternoon. She was absolutely smitten with my new cat, Garfield.