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The fall of the alley cat
Short story

By Majid
November 12, 2001
The Iranian

I found her twisted body lying next to a ditch in the back alley. She was all black and blue; barely breathing. She bore the face of a stranger who had weathered the abuse of an unpredictable, an uncontrollable tempest.

The nervous twitch in her eyes pulsated with abandonment to the sadistic rhythms that echoed fervently in the halls of her memory; rhythms played by a soloist whose crude instrument was violence. The scars on her body were the writings of an obscure novel whose chapters had been rewritten over and over again, but never concluded. And still among the buoyant aspects of her desolation ran amok the beginnings of a spectacle of an unimaginable horror.

In an abrupt fashion a dark shadow stepped forth to crack the marrow of that imperfect time with a perfect pitch of terror. The frail gaze of sanity was interrupted and then mutilated; its carcass pinned to the reflection of her eyes. The crackling of a voice forced all life about it into the amnesia of a void. It raided the calm of the night shooting down its auspicious look with the poisonous arrow of austerity. The voice erupted sickly: "Come kitty kitty... Come home sweet kitty... Come my sweet little Kitty... "

She shrieked from pain but her voice dared not pry too far. This was a voice afraid of being discovered, being heard, being followed. This was the same voice I had ignored before; it had crept out of sores on the walls of the adjacent flat. And now in this shallow ditch, this voice sought shelter from an impending doom; a place to creep into and vanish.

The expressions on her haunted face were couplings of unnatural postures; they were players in the final act of a chaotic theater of horror to which I was now an accidental spectator. Impassively, I had passed by this blemished face in the bleak and sickly-lit hallways of the building; and now I was rattled by the informality of its brutish introduction.

It seemed that all the tangible aspects of her reality were coerced into an abstract form that was unrecognizable by an ordinary eye but clearly visible to that of the abused and the abuser. In this mutually contained violent dimension rang the deafening tune of a beast's heart. This was the same beast whose smiles I had entertained with mine in the hallways; the same beast who had spoke to me softly with words devoid of any hints of madness.

It was the icy voice of this beast that had chased her into the alley and uttered sickly: "Come kitty kitty... Come home sweet kitty... Come to me Kitty kitty..."

The vibrations from his wild calls animated her into existence; but life hung timidly upon her body and she made no attempt to hold on to it. She had made that futile crossing from one end of the darkness to this dark -- dead end of an alley too many times. Too many times she had offered herself before the alter of his madness and each time she had arrived a little bit lighter, less confident, and more vulnerable. He had de-clawed, defaced, and debilitated her physically and emotionally. The drab look in her eyes foretold poignantly of this sick affair that she no longer wished to partake in.

When he arrived at her body, she had long passed away to that world from which no sane traveler would want to return from. He let out an inhumane cry of despair that made the flesh of death blush with fear. I stood there trembling, helpless, immobile, as he claimed her body and carried her off gently to that delusional world of his own making.

But even then death could not erase that desolate that haunting expression of despair off her face. She hauled it off to that world from which no sane traveler would want to return from. It was the same expression borne on the face of strangers who had weathered the abuse of an unpredictable and uncontrollable tempest; my own face drifting impassively among them.

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