“Well, what else am I to do?”
          She walks up the stairs. There is a slope of gravel with protruding wooden bars to step on: uneven, and slick with rain. She almost trips, but catches her balance. Unforgivable. She trudges onward, this time her rubber soles crunch the gravel to the left side. A couple steps and she turns across the line, bland gray rock to a carpet of brown pine needles. The girl is tall, but when she crouches she is reluctantly allowed under the umbrella of limbs. She pushes aside a reaching branch but misjudges the distance and falls forward, catching herself on the tree trunk and soiling her hand with smeared pearls of tacky resin.
          “Ugh.”
          Wiping her hands on her ripped denim is useless, and she slings her black canvas backpack to the side of her, avoiding the crushed beer cans and bottles scattered about. She doesn’t come to this place very often, but when this park had belonged to an elementary school, it was a place forbidden by the teachers but sneaked into anyway during recess: a sanctuary for secret gossip and shared snacks. She kneels on the bed of needles, and feels them pricking her uncovered knees. She studies the labels of the flattened tin cans: dull, dirty, and untouchable. She wonders if there were such things under the tree, all those years ago.
          It starts to lightly rain again, and she views the darkening, cloudy sky through the small archway of branches and tall grasses. It is the time of day when the day sky fades but refuses just yet to erupt into the bloody colors of the setting sun, reducing the light that somehow manages to seep through the thick cover of clouds that are ever present in this, her home town. As she thinks of the sunset she is reminded of visiting this park with her father when she was a little girl. He wore ridiculous sunglasses that were reflective like a mirror, and bright orange like the sun when it is huge and low in the sky. The thought makes her grimace. Those sunglasses were hideous.
          The low walls of branches and tall grass prevent her from seeing the cat as it approaches, until it rounds the corner into the archway. It is black with a small patch of white above its nose and yellow-green eyes that emit the fading light of the outdoors. It stops to consider her, and she, it. Eye contact is broken as it confidently charges forward and rams its forehead into her hand. How unusual, could it have some kind of disease? The cat places its front paws on her lap and rubs its head on her tense arm. Could a cat really be so lonely?
          “Stop it. Get off!” she commands as she begins to rise to her feet, and pushes it off of her, annoyed and slightly alarmed at the cat’s zeal. Her hands, still gummy with sap, stick to short pieces of loose black fur. She rushes to the archway but as she crosses the threshold something tugs at her ankle and she hits the ground. She yells out in surprise. Whatever had grabbed her ankle starts to drag her back under the tree with alarming force. She reaches out to pulls herself away but the slippery wood and loose gravel of the stairway is impossible to anchor onto and she frantically cranes her head around her shoulder to catch a glimpse of her attacker.
          It looks nothing like it, but she is sure that what is attacking her is the cat. The creature is deformed and constantly morphing into different edges, with no visible eyes but a body like a thick cloud of smoke and a gaping mouth. She wrestles a foot free and aims a kick above the creature’s mouth, but when she makes contact it is a strange feeling. Her legs sinks through like incredibly thick pudding and a force like gravity seems to pull her in. She is helpless as the strange creature consumes her, but she feels no pain. What she sees as she sinks down the creature’s throat is like looking out the back window of a car as it drives through a tunnel, and she finds a strange peace, knowing that it is the end as the surroundings fade to black.
          What comes next surprises her. She sees the room under the tree through the eyes of the cat, and everything seems so much bigger. She sees the room as she once had, when she was a little girl.