The Anima [completed]

3.

3.

I collapsed onto my bed in a heap, my stomach swollen from the pepperoni pizza I had devoured. Everyone had gone to bed, exhausted as the night began to press its heavy clock down upon our town. The bloodstone was warm on my chest as I started at the cracked ceiling. Our house seemed new on the outside, but appearances are deceiving. It was one of the oldest houses in the town; built when people first began to make it their permanent home, with wooden panels and leftover cracked tiles. While the insides of the house were slowly beginning to decay, it gave it a certain atmosphere. It was almost as if the house was a living and breathing organism. Sometimes Virgo and I liked to imagine the house could talk to us, and would ask the walls what games we should play or where we should hide whilst playing hide and seek.

Virgo always said the house held the spirits of our ancestors. But they could only talk to her, not to me.

Eclipse, Virgo's cat, jumped up onto my bed and interrupted my thoughts.

Her eyes were amber, contrasting vividly against her shiny black coat which barely shed in the summer months. I lifted my hand so she could rub her head on my nails. She ignored my hand and pawed my side, the signs she made when she was hungry. I sighed and shifted off my bed, knowing she would not let me sleep until she had been fed. While Eclipse was supposed to be Virgo's cat, I was the one who got stuck with feeding and cleaning her. Not that I minded, but she had a habit of waking me up in the middle of the night because she wanted to go outside.

I stumbled down the hallway, still wearing my long dress but free of the pain of high heels. My instep was slowly adjusting to the flat surface of the ground after being curved upright for hours. Eclipse followed, curling herself repetitively around my legs. It wasn't until I reached the fridge that I noticed the sliding door to the backyard was left open. I sighed, knowing that Virgo had probably gone outside to cleanse her stones under the moonlight or make another 'enchanted' piece of jewellery.

"Virgo?" I whisper yelled, stepping out into the grass. The tall trees that grew on the boarder of the national park swayed like dancers in the breeze. The grass tickled my toes, spiking into my skin, and the night birds chirped. But there was no sign of Virgo.

I turned to go back inside, but the ball of fur called Eclipse shot between my legs and made a beeline to the forest. I groaned and sat on the back step; only an idiot would leave a door open when they knew their animal liked to explore. I knew better than to go after her; the trees held secrets in their branches; many unkind creatures lay within them. And with the addition of having Extra-terrestrial obsessed parents, I also knew that if aliens did walk among us, they targeted those alone, particularly in forested regions.

Closing my eyes, I let the wind press soft kisses onto my cheeks and brush its gentle fingers through my hair. I relaxed into its embrace and for a moment I forgot about Lucas and the performance and the strange men in the hall. But reality always triumphed; the moment did not last forever.

There was thump. A sickening, wet, thump at my feet. I peeled my eyes open in drowsiness, expecting to see a dead mouse at my feet; a gift from Eclipse. Instead, it was Eclipse who was at my feet.

The cat's body was twisted; mangled pieces of flesh spewing out from its stomach. Its neck was snapped, the bone protruding out of the fur. Its insides hollowed, as if an ice cream scoop spooned them out, the body had folded in on itself, with no support structure to keep it in one piece. Her amber eyes were missing. The cat was no longer Eclipse.

I couldn't control it, the bile rising in my throat, and spewed the remains of my dinner onto the corpse. The sight of the corpse, now covered in my own insides, only served to make it worse. I clutched my stomach as a searing pain rippled through my middle and the rest of my dinner fell from my dried lips. Attempting to rise, I stumbled and fell hands first into the mess, my fingers digging into the mattered fur of the cat. A wretched gurgle escaped my burning throat as my hands darkened with blood. It was only then that I began to sob.