Feline

Hi guys!

This was my first week of doing Creative Writing at uni and our first homework was to write an 800-1000 story with an element of the surreal. This is still a pretty rough draft but if anyone is bored with nothing else to do and interested in having a read and leaving some feedback, here it is!

Feline

 

The end. Her irises had the texture of reptile scales, almost like a small circle of crinkled foil or a thin flake of gold. They burned a radioactive, liquid green that looked like it might trickle from her eye and drip down her cheek at any moment. Even her pupils were hypnotic with their way of dilating like inky black saucers that stretched and threatened to split her eyes when she was excited and their way of shrinking to devilish slits when she was angry. She stood at five foot seven, a few inches shorter than myself with the slender body of a woman but the long swishing tail and soft, fluffy head of a cat.

Her furry, pointed ears immediately darted around towards the sound of my voice when I offered to buy her a drink on the first night we met. I fell for her the second she turned around. Her name was Kiera.

“Strawberry wine please,” she smiled.

She was very confident and used to men falling over themselves to pay her attention.

We sat at a curtained booth next to a window with only a small lamp lighting our tiny room. The glow from street lights and cars flashing past in waves smudged and melted on the window as the rain pattered on the glass with increasingly rapidity while we talked.

“I’m only fifteen you know. You just broke the law by buying me a drink,” she smirked as she swirled the glass in her hand.

“Well I suppose that means we only have one year to wait until we can get married, with your parents’ consent, of course,” I said, sipping my whiskey.

“So you want to marry me then?” Her pupils began to swell and a mischievous, child-like grin crept on her lips.

“Well that won’t exactly be easy,” her smile faded before she said, “You don’t know who my parents are, do you?”

“No, who are they?”

“The Conways’.”

The Conways were a notorious drug family in our hometown. Every business in the main street worked until their fingers bled to provide the Conways’ weekly protection money and the family supplied every upper, downer, narcotic, tranquiliser, sedative, hallucinogenic, opiate and stimulant you could think of. The authorities were bribed regularly so, naturally, the police turned a blind eye to every drug deal, threat, assault, con, theft and murder the Conways committed. Small children would stop dead, drop their toys and run back into their houses when they saw the Conways walking down the street. It was even rumoured that they kept the body parts, and even the eyeballs, of their victims pickled in vinegar and displayed in jars on their living room mantel.

To make matters worse, my family, the Fergusons’, were their biggest rivals. I was also a child brought up around dodgy dealings and drugs being mixed in the kitchen.

I told Kiera my full name, David Ferguson, and immediately she knew who my parents were.

We talked for around two hours, exchanging childhood stories and pouring our hearts out to each other about our biggest hopes and ambitions.

At around ten o’clock the pub began to get rowdy as the karaoke started.

“Oh, I have to do my song!” Kiera said and guzzled down the rest of her strawberry wine before running to the stage.

She sat up on a tall stool on the tiny stage at the back on the pub. The main lights were dimmed and five bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling around her shone warmly as she began to sing.

Frankie died just the other night
Some say it was suicide
But we know
How the story goes.

With his six string knife
And his street wise pride
The boy was a man before his time
And she knew
All their dreams would come true. 
 

Her trickling high notes were light and airy and her low tone raspy and full of grit as she whipped her long, black tail in glee and occasionally flashed her pearly, sharp teeth. The humble, shabby old pub erupted with applause, cheers and whistles when she finished. She shyly bowed and played with her waist length, glossy hair as her eyes grew almost completely black.

“You were amazing up there! Why don’t you pursue music?” I gushed when she sat back down and took a big gulp from her fresh glass of pink, fizzy wine.

“It’s something I would love to do,” she confessed as she steadied her breathing. “I’m an artist too. I can’t go a day without painting.”

At eleven o’clock, Kiera said it was about time she headed home. By this point, she was merrily smiling and giggling, aglow with a whole bottle of sickly sweet strawberries in her system so I insisted on walking her home, which I would have done regardless.

As we stepped out into the torrential rain, I wrapped my huge leather jacket around her and she huddled into my side as we walked. I could faintly hear her warm, humming, chesty purr gently rattling as we approached her street. Abruptly she stopped and turned to me. Her perfectly symmetrical, feline features and dome eyes appeared disheartened as she stared into my eyes.

“Let’s runaway. Let’s just leave this place, now, tonight!”

Before I could respond, Kiera through her arms around me and crushed her lips against mines. I held the small of her back and pulled her closer as her whiskers and soft fur tickled my upper lip. I instantly felt something so magnetic and electrifying that I forgot the rest of the world existed. There was something profoundly chemical about the two of us together. I knew then that I could never be without her and that my life before tonight was merely existing, not living.

Completely smitten, I couldn’t say no to her. We ran to the train station hand in hand, shivering, soaking wet and freezing with nothing but the clothes on our backs. We jumped onto the first glowing train that arrived and sped off into the dusky, stormy horizon. The beginning.