Mr. Snickerdoodles by Brian Hesse (reading rainbow books txt) 📕

thought Jacob, as the cat quickly lept from his chest and ran out the bedroom door into the dim morning light of the morning. Before Jacob could think of attending to his bleeding wounds, he rolled over on his left side and cried out loud “My sweet Jasmine I am so sorry my love. I am sorry I didn't cover up that damned hole.”

After several days of drinking with Bob and making excuses for the cuts on his face, Jacob decided that he would kill that son-of-a-bitch Mr. Snickerdoodles.

Jacob exclaimed out loud to the empty kitchen, “How can this be an apparition sent for revenge? My sweetheart loved me so much and could never hurt me. This is just an ordinary neurotic cat and, like all cats, he wants to kill the hand that always fed him,” Just then a revelation occurred to Jacob, like Moses discovering that talking burning bush. Maybe that cat killed my darling Jasmine, he considered. Maybe she didn't just trip over a 3-foot wall plunging to her death. Maybe Mr. Snickerdoodles is to blame. At this moment, Jacob decided that Mr. Snickerdoodles the killer cat must die.

Killing Snickerdoodles

So, several attempts were made at this deadly endeavor. Jacob's pastime now consisted of, not drinking, avoiding all contact with his alcoholic brother Bob, and killing a cat repeatedly. Each time the cat died, he would return that night to sit on Jacob's chest, steal his oxygen, causing near asphyxiation, and leaving a new set of scars to remind Jacob that he can never die until Jacob is dead. Jacob spent his days in horrified anguish and guilt so deep as if a parasite was slowly travelling through his body feeding on muscle and bone until nothing's left but a pile of withered flesh.

 The first execution involved drowning. Jacob remembered the day his father decided to teach him a “valuable” life lesson. Jacob's father gathered five stray kittens from the barn, placed them in a sack, and threw them in the pond behind the house. Jacob could remember the baby-like screaming coming from the weighted down sack until it finally was submerged.

 Shortly after that first night of being attacked, Jacob retrieved a garbage bag from underneath the sink, a piece of rope from the barn, and a rock from his overgrown weed infested backyard. He was expecting one hell of a fight from the beast. To Jacob's surprise, Mr. Snickerdoodles just gave him a serene, almost anesthetized look, and just walked into the bag. Without allowing shock to set in and distract him from his grisly work, Jacob closed the bag, filled up the bathtub with warm water, and forced the bag under the water. Again, to Jacobs amazement, Mr. Snickerdoodles neither cried like the drowning kittens of his youth, nor did he even move a muscle as the water rushed into his small lungs. Jacob, confused and unsure of himself, held the bag underwater for fifteen minutes.

“Nothing could hold its breath that long,” said Jacob under his breath.

The second-time involved rat poison. Jacob filled up Mr. Snickerdoodle's favorite blue plastic bowl with cat chow, liver hearts, and tuna (Mr. Snickerdoodles favorite). He also added a good helping of enough rat poison to dissolve the insides of an elephant. Again, the beast just looked at Jacob with that same docile expression of the eyes and ate the entire plate with the same blank emotionless expression.

Jacob now remembered a time when he observed that familiar docile expression. When he was a sixteen-year-old with the world at his feet, he was given a job as the butcher at a local chicken farm owned by his late grandfather, Karl Smith. He remembered when a new shipment of chickens would come in on a Sunday morning. For a mile down the road you would hear clucking and high- pitched screeching that would deafen a person if they got too close to the truck. However, once the truck came within fifty feet of the plant, and the chickens smelt the blood of their comrades, all crying and clucking would stop. The chickens would hang their heads out the side of the truck with large glazed over eyes that stared into nothing…. or something beyond the livings field of comprehension. The chickens reminded him of a thousand bobble heads just bobbing in the breeze as the chickens passed by with their heads hanging out of the truck, swaying back and forth to their impending demise. Mr. Snickerdoodles had this same look with each violent death, but at night he returned with the look of an assassin bent on revenging the death of the only thing he could ever have loved in this life.... mistress Jasmine.

 The third and final death was the messiest. Jacob decided that only massive body trauma would stop this beast from returning. Something had to be done because Jacob's face looked like he allowed a two-year old child to shave him with a straight razor. He retrieved the double-barreled shotgun from the bedroom closet and loaded both barrels with magnum slugs. Slugs are nothing more than oversized bullets for a shotgun and the damage they cause is quite severe.

“Here Mr. Snickerdoodles…. pssss…. pssss.”

 Mr. Snickerdoodles quickly jumped through the first-floor broken window and sat looking docilely at Jacob from the window ledge. Jacob leveled the shotgun and fired.... BOOOOM…. BOOOOM, the blast made Jacobs ears immediately clog as if someone jammed his head with thick wads of cotton. The remainder of the window blew outwards along with large bloody clumps of hair and raw meat. Mr. Snickerdoodles was nothing more than a bloody pile of organic matter.

" See, you bastard, you’re not a fucking ghost!" yelled Jacob to the chunks of bloody flesh dripping from the wall. Immediately after this thought, images of finding Jasmine bloody body at the bottom of the well came to his weary mind. Jacob drank a bottle of Jack Daniels and slept the first peaceful night he could remember in a such a long time.

The next night Jacob was standing outside enjoying the sound of those crickets, the feel of the tall overgrown grass, and the smell of flowers that still seemed to grow strong among all the rotting weeds. Jacob thought to himself how maybe it was time to get off the bottle, grow some crops, remember his wife the way she was while alive, and finally board up that damned well. Just as these thoughts opened the lighted door inside a mind that has grown too dark, since the death of his soul-mate, he heard an ominous noise creeping from behind. Jacob's heart pounded like a jackhammer as he slowly turned his head and saw his old feline avenging demon looking at him with large emerald intelligent eyes. Without a word or a thought, Jacob walked like a zombie to the edge of the old well and jumped in head first.

Cat from Beyond

Dr. Ernest Wheeler came out several days later to retrieve Jacob's body from the well. It was several days later because, although Bob was out several times to visit his brother, he was just too damn drunk, or too damn stupid, to check the well.

“What a tragedy,” exclaimed Dr. Wheeler to Bob after the work of retrieval was complete. I never saw anything like this in my twenty years as coroner. First, we pull out the body of a beautiful wife and cat from this damn well, and now a year later we pull out the grieving suicidal husband.”

“What do you mean the cat?” asked Bob with a tone filled with confusion, and an equally confused expression.

“We found Mr. Snickerdoodles body underneath Jasmine’s corpse when we retrieved her. I determined that she was holding that cat while standing near the well. Mr. Snickerdoodles probably jumped in and Jasmine leaned over to grab him before falling face first to the bottom.

 “I don't think Jacob knew about that,” replied Bob.

“No, I guess not, said coroner Wheeler. I didn't think it was important to tell him. He was so torn apart by Jasmine's death. She should have just let that damn cat go! They do have nine lives you know."

 

End

Imprint

Text: Brian Hesse
Publication Date: 10-09-2017

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