He was fucking whistling. As he shattered my knees and elbows with a hammer, before placing my right cheek on the middle rack of my oven and turned it to a comfortable-for-cookies 350°F, this asshole was channelling his inner coal mining dwarf. If I hadn’t been blinded by the pain of what was too awful to be called violent, humiliated by the fear that presented in my panties, and terrified by the smell of my own hair singeing in an oven that had only just begun to cool from dinner, I might have found this absurd. Comical, in a Patrick-Bateman-shoving-a-cat-into-an-ABM kind of way.
As it was, the only thing I thought, beyond “holy mother of fuck, please just kill me” and “burning hair smells awful,” was that I would be cat food in an hour and no one would find me until Tuesday at the earliest. I was on staycation, I wasn’t seeing anyone, I didn’t know my neighbours – I was an introvert with friends who were used to going weeks without seeing me and my family lived halfway across the country.
Out the corner of my half-baked eye, through a wet, cataract-like haze, I could see him check his watch. “Sorry to keep you,” was what I wanted to brazenly quip, but a pathetic, weak gurgle was all my lungs would give me. Jesus Christ Sylvia, you meant serious fucking business. And then I heard Oscar. Purring. The last sound I would hear was my turncoat, bastard cat purring as the man who was baking my head like a honey ham scratched his ears.
He turned the oven off before he left, leaving it to cool. We knew, long after he’d closed the door behind him, that Oscar would eat my nose, my cheeks, and my eyes, before he set his sandpaper tongue to my skull to clean off the left over sticky bits. And that is how I would be found: my head in an oven, three quarters of my face gone, beside a fat Persian cleaning flecks of me from his imperious pug-like face. Fucking cat.
*
From the wilds of Canada, Kim Matheson is a wife, momma, doula, baker, and promoter of nifty (often local) things with a penchant for urban fantasy, blues rock, coffee, and ice cream. You can find Kim on Twitter at @foxyouverymuch
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