FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Discorporated

I wandered through the uneven streets, savoring the cold night wind as it blew against my body, enjoying the way it ruffled my black and white fur. I looked down at the remains of my trench coat. The sleeves were merely frayed pieces of cloth now, swinging loosely against my shirt and pants, which shared a similar appearance. To think that I bought the farm for ninety bucks made me laugh, and my laughter sounded high-pitched and hysterical. Why shouldn't it be? I could afford to laugh at things now and not worry about what I was laughing at.

The people walked passed me without glancing in my direction. Of course they wouldn't; you can't look at someone who isn't there to begin with. I was glad that they couldn't see me; my appearance would have definitely warranted a nice supply of sneering looks and condescending twitches of the nose. I could never stand those kinds of people, even when I was alive.

I followed a tall haughty-looking person into an elevator, judging by his own looks to be a doctor or an attorney. It was a game I always played when I was feeling bored with my new semi-existence; you look at someone and try to guess their occupation by looking at them, and if you win the first game you try to guess their lifestyle, which, more often than not, is way different than their job life.

The secret of knowing how people lived their life behind the curtains became so interminable after a while, though.

Realizing that the doctor-attorney was really the president of a bathroom fixture company, I walked out of the elevator with him, walking to the left while he went right. I was in a building that seemed strangely familiar to me, but I couldn't remember how I knew it. I stood there for hours, trying to remember. I gave it up as a lost cause and walked out of the place, wiping the blood that ran down my nose. It was another thing I noticed; whenever I try to think about things, my nose starts bleeding. At least it's my nose and not my eyes like some.

I walked back out into the streets, my toes tapping against the cracks in the tiles. It didn't hurt, though, which was good, but it happened so often that I finally tripped and fell on my face. I picked myself up and brushed off the dirt from the rags I wore. Suddenly I had the urge to go back to the cemetery. I don't know where the urge came from, but I felt that I had to go, that I needed to be there right now.

So I walked. I didn't stop walking even when I passed the rusty and misshapen gates that foretold of the graveyard.

It was a very big spot of land, but there were very few graves. I recognized mine...and I recognized the black cat in the shimmering white cocktail dress crouching beside the little tombstone. She saw me walking toward her and waved to me. The shining white smile on her face was gorgeous, but it frightened me beyond words.

She stood up, her legs becoming two, long pillars of pure and impenetrable darkness as her tail flickered invisibly behind her. She was holding a little jar, wrapped in a green and blue foil paper, tied with a length of nylon rope.

"How are you doing, Matt?" she asked me. Her Parisian accent was as smooth as satin, and her yellow eyes glowed with a honey-colored light that was warm and alluring. I said that I was fine, that she needn't have worried, and she said that she wasn't worried at all. As she spoke, I could hear the base of her African heritage bleed through into her words. It made her voice all that much lovelier...and that much more sickening to me as I remembered it.

"It's been three days," I said, walking up to her. I barely reached her shoulders. "Why am I not dead yet?"

The feline smiled. "Oh, you shouldn't be thinking about things like that. Here, I packed a lunch for you."

A lunch? But it was so far into the night it would be called a midnight snack. I didn't correct her, though, knowing what she was capable of when she was annoyed or angry.

I noticed that she had already laid down a checkered cloth, spread out near my open grave with a woven picnic basket. She kneeled down, opened the basket, and took out a pomegranate. She motioned for me to sit down, and I did. I accepted the pomegranate and bit into it.

There was a silence in which we ate for the longest time. I knew that she would walk away and leave me here, leave me to walk around through the same streets in exploration of the dull new half-life of mine. And why shouldn't she? She did it before. I suppose when you're an accomplished bokor and from a long line of accomplished bokors, people's lives must seem like tinker toys to you. When I was alive and dating her, it certainly seemed like that's what she made me out to be in her twisted imagination.

I thought it only was her imagination. How could I have known she would do this to me? What I wanted to know was why.

I summed up my courage (following people aimlessly into private areas seemed to give me a type of courage that probably bordered more on obliviousness than bravery) and asked her why she took my soul. She looked at me for the longest time with those honey-golden eyes, and I knew she was deep in heavy thought because I felt the fur on my arms bristle.

"It's not important, Matty."

"I think it is."

"I don't think so, and what I think is really more important than what you believe. One of the reasons why you are here is because you forgot that little fact. Now please eat up, I don't want you looking skinny like that whelp of a ferret...

"But I forgot."

"Of course you did," she said, giving me a condescending look as though I were a meddlesome child. "I wanted you to forget. You were annoying, you were a coward, and you went against everything I said. I didn't want to believe daddy when he said you were nothing to me and you had to be put out of the way, but when you pulled that little stunt at the mall, I realized that, as far as your stupidity went, you could've become a danger to me. So that's why I did this to you, why I gave to you a life that will never end, a life devoid of pain and agony. I accept all forms of apologies, vocal or in written form."

"But...you can give people back their souls, right?"

"Yes."

"Do you think I can get mine back?"

"No."

"But why not?" I sounded a bit too petulant, but I didn't care.

"Because you were a useless little shit and I'm somewhat loathe to lose you now that I have you."

I started to get angry. I growled low in my throat and made as if to stand up, but she was already on her feet while I was still squatting on my knees. She raised her arms and spread her fingers out before her, her golden eyes bright with an eerie light that suggested a prerogative beyond normal capability. I heard a crackling sound, and I leapt up as a hand, gnarled and misshapen and trailing bits of rotted flesh, reached up for me, tearing through the red and white cloth with its broken fingernails.

I stepped back, and the black cat raised her hands higher. Golden sparks shot out of her eyes, and an orange mist poured from her open mouth in a fashion that was both gaseous and liquid. I turned to run, but some unseen force was pulling me down, forcing me to my knees. I crashed into the ground, which seemed solid five minutes ago but now seemed to be as damp and soft as a swamp. I looked beyond the dark feline and saw tombstones and burial plaques being thrown up from the earth, as though the land felt sick at the thought of having them, and spewing out of the desecrated graves were their former tenants, all very much dead yet very "lively". They gripped at the dirt, clawing and rending at it to get out while making harsh, gasping noises, hoarse with gravel that clogged their decomposed lungs.

I tried to get up, but she didn't want me to.

"Don't you ever," she growled at me, "Ever...talk back to me. You should be grateful that you still have your body! You should be grateful_that I've let you out beyond the grave! You ask me why I turned you into this, when the answer is right there in front of your eyes. Open your eyes, you _stupid idiot!"

I did open my eyes, and I didn't like what I saw. The corpses were rising steadily from the ground, and those that could walk were hobbling and tapping through the muck, which bubbled and frothed with unseen horrors, possibly other bodies wanting out. A constant moaning and groaning merged into an inharmonious drone that seemed to rise and fall all around me. I felt something pulling at my tail, and as I turned around I caught sight of a wedding veil, ripped and torn and caked with mud, swaying to and fro as thought the sound its owner was hearing was an elegant mambo.

What became a gentle tugging exploded into a forceful jerk, and as a loud crack filled my ears I felt my tail ripped from its dutiful resting place. There was no pain, only a brutal pull and a sense of loss that was unfamiliar to me. The thing in the wedding veil placed a rotted hand around my belly, and I felt a soft furry thing brush against my chest. I looked down and saw my tail, as well as the torn muscle and bone that connected it to my body.

I looked up and she was looking at me. There was a pleased look on her face, and a smile spread like a disease over her night-black feline face. She raised her paws in the cold air and moved them, etching a symbol into thin air with a yellow mist. It stayed there, glowing, and I stared at it, aware of my sudden drowsiness.

I blinked myself awake, and noticed that the ground was hard again. There was no droning moan, no awful smell that permeated the air with a fetid, touchable stench. There were no shambling dead anywhere about me. There was only the cold, cold wind blowing in from the North, and her towering above me as though she were a goddess. We looked at each other, not saying a word. I wanted to know what she was thinking, but a voice in my head said that that wasn't a good idea.

After a long while of frigid silence, I asked "Why?"

She smiled then, and her eyes gave a dull throb of honey-golden light. She made a sign with her hand (It might have been my imagination, but I'm sure I heard a rattle being shaken somewhere), and her body dissolved into a black smoke, blowing in my face on the wind. Words failed my powers of description; she simply was there, and then dissolved into the air. The last thing that made me know that she had been there at all were her golden eyes, which floated in place and stared at me. They were merely two orbs, throbbing with that unnatural golden light, fading slowly until finally winking out with a bright flash.

She wasn't there anymore.

Am I really here, or am I somewhere else? I started walking out of the graveyard, trying to figure out that question.