"Who's that? Where in all the world did you find yourself a cat, Corey?"
When he hears Maya´s voice in his back, he doesn't turn around. Up to the throat, she is still wrapped up in her sleeping bag. Hopefully she'll stay that way, he thinks, and wont peel out of it. It is too early to engage.
"You cannot keep it, you know," she murmurs and rolls over, closing her eyes again, as if she heard his thoughts. "Even from here I can see the pendant. This cat belongs to someone, don't get attached to it."
Useless advice, that's what you can expect to get out here all the time.
Why would he get attached?
Attachment issues due to trauma in prior relationships, his ex-wife diagnosed him with, before she left and traumatized him even more.
She might not have been a good person, but with all the issues of her own, and after online-courses that he spent months paying off, she was at least good at her job.
It is the cat who is getting attached, not him. Her head is rubbing against his bearded chin, slides off the edges and over his cheek, where her fur is tickling his skin.
As her low rumble starts vibrating through him, he feels a flicker of something that he hasn't felt in years. Perhaps a connection, a spark of warmth in his desolate life. Until it hurts. The heart that she is carrying, metallic and heated up by intensifying rays of the morning sun.
Their bonding moment is interrupted. Corey flinches back, when it touches his neck. So does the cat, before he puts the can of beer on the burn mark to ice his pain, and when the tension leaves his body again, it leaves hers as well. His eyes on the pendant that just burnt him, he reaches for it cautiously. It is heavier than it looks. With a sigh, he fumbles with the clasp to see what's inside, but before it can spring open, the cat pulls away from him and jumps off his lap. With her tail nervously trembling, and the current purr dying in her throat, it is sitting down right next to him, staring him into the ground.
Fair enough, the pendant has to wait.
He needs to win her trust again, and starts by scratching her gently behind the ears.
Why is she even here?
Did she flee the town and its people just like Corey did?
He wouldn't be surprised. Only in perverted attire and horrific masks, you are still permitted into the nightclub that is society these days.
Behind its doors, the people are dancing and drinking to keep the party going, as if nothing bad is happening. Outside, however, the fire of wars is going off, and kept alive with the tax money of the dancing crowd inside. Bombs are flying, but behind the doors you wouldn't hear it due to the loud techno beats that are playing, while close to the threshold the poor are starving in silence.
The attendants of the party step over their dead bodies on the way inside the club, without taking notice.
The black cat has started purring again and returns on Corey´s lap. Yes, it must have fled from a few billion Frankensteins in town whose construction is reaching a climax. From the monster-human-mass that calls itself society these days.
Perhaps she is one of us, Corey thinks. She might have come here to hide from everything that is going wrong in our time.
Rubbing her head, his fingers hit a sticky spot in her fur. When he glances at his hand, his skin looks grimson and gives off a sweet, metallic scent. He smelled it before, last when he got his nose broken by a prison ward. It is the scent of blood that the black cat is rubbing off on him.
Contemplatively, he leans back and rubs his fingers against each other to get the faint blood stains off his skin.
It is probably the blood of mice as big as rats and rats as big as cats, both of which you would spot close to the riverbanks. Still purring, the cat looks at him with half-closed eyes, as if she's not at all ashamed of it.
What a bitch!
Corey envies her. She must have been hunting before he discovered her, and that is where the blood is from. If that's the case, then her shameless attitude is appropriate.
Why should she feel ashamed of who she is?
Why should she feel bad about stalking rats and mice, pouncing on them, and snapping their necks at the first bite, so she can rip open their bellies, tear out their warm entrails, and gulp them down in order to survive?
It has a purpose. It is what she is meant to do. Corey envies her because she's shamelessly and unapologetically doing what she is supposed to do. Unlike himself.
He has always been ashamed. Disgusted, even, by all the things that a human being on this earth and at this very point in time is supposed to be doing, according to the monster-human-mass that is society these days.
Chasing after big money and pretending you are something. Lying to others to make them feel comfortable, and judging anyone who does it differently.
With lies up to your neck, you're supposed to find a wife to have a child and build a life with that fits her Instagram and our bank account. Despite the faint suspicion that it's as inappropriate for who you really are as dirty talk would be for a Bible study group. Because you are completely different from what you make others believe, but in the end you forget it yourselves, until you forget yourselves and become who others see in you.
Corey is ashamed of all the things that people expect of other people nowadays, and maybe that is why he is here, after a bite of the sun, under the train bridge, and with a blood-smeared cat on his lap.
Here, where prostitutes hide from their pimps, and wait for loaded businessmen.
Here, where teenagers hide from their parents to get wasted with Cannabis and a bit of drink.
Here, where dealers hide from the guards, and where junkies hide from their lives, right next to homeless people who are hiding just as well. From the disheartening truth that no one cares whether or not they survive.
Since they stopped living the way that the monster-human-mass tells them to be living, they haven't been human to them anymore.
They are not wanted in the towns, because in town dumping waste isn't allowed, and that is what they are to others, waste that would compromise the tidy picture that they are trying to create.
Like trousers after a feast, the homeless shelters in town are bursting at the makeshift seams, with which the talentless government seamstress is trying to hold the scraps together, and ever since the homeless haven't had a place to stay in town they have been banished from there.
The black cat is purring on Corey´s lap, like she doesn't care about any of it. Maybe she can teach him how to stop caring. It would be worth a shot, and out here most things are not…
She rubs her head with the sticky spot against his chest, and smears blood all over him.
Next to them, Big Joe crawls out of his sleeping bag and when he gets up, he yawns at Corey and stumbles closer.
"In seven days from now, ya? Don´t forget," he mumbles, shaking his legs awake. "I cannot wait for it any longer, it has been half a year and that crowd… If they won't get what you owe them, they will break your legs."
The black cat ducks down and flattens her ears, as if she senses the faint horror that is weaving Corey in. As soon as he notices her fear, his touches grow gentle to lower her growing agitation. A hoarse "hush" crawls from his lips. Even though it is low, it is loud enough to reach Big Joe´s perked up ears. Prancing, he approaches a step, silent violence in his glance.
"Don´t you hush me, Corey! For now I will pretend that this ridiculous sound was meant for the new friend on your lap, but next time I won't let you off. You can take this as a warning, alright? It would be my absolute pleasure to remove the vocal cords out of your throat that you haven't used either way for the past months. So if you are planning on ever reactivating your voice again, I would be careful, if I were you."
Corey´s mouth opens as if he wants to answer, but nothing would come out, either way, no matter how hard he would try. It isn't like he hasn't done so in the past few months. Oh, he has been trying, but his voice is lost. It dies somewhere in his throat, before a single word can make it off his lips. He has lost his ability to speak up, his capability of expressing himself. A heart-wrenching curse for a man who used to be brilliant with words.
With his fingers buried in the cat´s obsidian fur, he gives Big Joe a nod. Submissive and timid enough to turn him away. Corey's fingers in the fur can relax again.
Why did they cramp up in the first place?
Unlike everyone else, he isn't afraid of Big Joe.
He used to be a journalist, he can sense truth and lies from miles away. That's how he knows that the stories which you hear about Big Joe out here are fairy tales.
Except for one. Something, and only God knows what it is exactly, ties the man to groups of organized crime. Corey knows it to be true, because the same groups are how he made it out of jail with a new identity and come out here to hide.
Despite his crime scene ties, Big Joe isn't the man that everyone out here sees in him. He doesn't break legs, doesn´t cut off fingers, doesn´t beat up guards, doesn´t remove organs, doesn´t side with pimps, and would never traffic women. If he did any of it, why would he sleep under the bridge?
He is more scared of the people who tie him to local gangs than Corey is, even though the latter is the one who has owed them ever since they helped him out.
Corey should never have taken them up on their offer. He should never have let them help, but it is a different world in jail, where you wake to the open threats and insults that prison guards slap you with every morning and start looking forward to your own death.
More often than not, you feel like you have already met it, because for the world out there, you cease to exist, once you are locked up in a prison cell. Then your eyes get so weary of the bars going by that they fail to grasp anything else. You feel like these are a thousand bars you see, a thousand, and no world beyond.
Only now and then, the curtain over your eyes lifts in silence, and an image is entering. Then your tensed up limbs start trembling with violence, before the shiver dies again in your numb gone heart.
Corey has known what the locking mechanism of a prison´s security doors sounds like even before they put him behind bars. He was there before, but back then as a journalist, and voluntarily. It felt differently.
When you are in as a terrorist, not even the locking of the doors behind you sounds the same, because you have not chosen to be locked up yourself, and you know one thing for sure. Your fate has been taken out of your hands. It isn't yours anymore.
When they approach you then and offer you their help, you will take it. In what might be your last and only attempt at a chance to feel in control of your own life again. The worry about paying them has to wait. In Corey´s case, it has waited until now, because so have they, for the 250.000 that he owes them.
He won't have it for them, no way. The mere thought of it drives a shiver through his body. Alerted by it, the black cat jumps off his lap and vanishes behind the pile of useless things that´s gathered right in front of him.