She answered a call from her own number. The silence she heard ran a finger up her spine. Was that a meow in the background? No, she could be imagining it, her mind racing.&nbsp;		“It’s him”, she thought and her blood rushed into her ears, drowning out any sound she thought she could have heard. “Cat man”.&nbsp;		“My pendulum, where’s my pendulum?” She panicked, trying to locate it in the mess of her apartment while her vision stretched and contracted. She located it on the table under a mountain of papers and she traced the circle it made with her eyes.&nbsp;Did she want him to be calling? Was she safe where she stood?&nbsp; 	A squirrel climbed down the trellises and disappeared into the planter box outside the window. She bared her teeth. She’d seen it coming and going for days, most likely securing its bounty for the next days, folding back the green to push little snacks into the folds. “Help me!” She wanted to tell the squirrel; “tell him to stop”.&nbsp;	But did she want him to stop? The only other person to know who she was, what she had become.&nbsp; 	The silence on the other end of the line continued and she dropped the call, placing it back on the table amid the mountain of papers.&nbsp;She went to the fridge and opened it, as if by the frequency of her present she could shake the pressure that had built in her head. She poured a glass of milk, hands shaking, and lapped it up before placing the empty cup in the sink.&nbsp; 	She had met him when he was charming. Magnetic. She recognized something in his eyes and thought it prudent to discover why she recognized something in the irises. He grinned at her with his sharp teeth. And then she ran.&nbsp; She was the runner. He fixed his eyes on her and focused on her descent.&nbsp;		She had awoken several mornings itchy. Itchy as if something had crawled into her arm while she slept. She yowled. What had happened in the hours since she had closed her eyes? She didn’t know if she wanted to know because as much as she tried to set her boundaries, he persisted, and she felt caught in the cage of his gaze. He had had keys cut, she assumed, because when she woke up sometimes small things had been moved around the apartment. A potted plant that had lived on the fridge was now in the pantry. A pair of eyeglasses slipped over the eyes of her teddy bear. She had thought it was cute, at first, his obsession. She felt flattered. But that was years ago and he hadn’t materialized as she had thought. Still, she trusted the Twin Flame journey and the likelihood that all would be well in the fullness of time.&nbsp; 	It wasn’t anymore. She wasn’t anymore. She felt different in a way she couldn’t put her finger on. She batted away a fly that flew too close to her nose. She resisted an urge to open her mouth and swallow it. Was everybody’s Twin Flame journey so complicated? She assumed it was; and she had decided to let it run its course. Now every time she saw the resident mouse she wanted to chase it as she felt chased.&nbsp;	Nursery rhymes rose up in her mind and she reduced the urge to grab a carving knife.&nbsp;		It was their soul she had seen in his eyes. She had put that one together after a simple google search; “why do I feel like I know this person? Why did he peer into my soul? Are souls real?” She hadn’t thought she had one and had been delighted to find they did in fact exist, evident by the way his soul had stared right back at hers.&nbsp;		She remembered when his cat had died. He had been beside himself with grief. The close complexity of human to animal bonding was evident in the way he had cherished his cat. His eyes had narrowed in on her and she felt perhaps he had wished she had gone the way of the cat. But this obsession had gone too far. She yawned, stretching out her back in micro movements as the breath entered her body.&nbsp;	The information came to her gradually, a combination of intuition and extrasensory confirmation. A pendulum helped, swinging back and forth for no and in a circle for yes.&nbsp;	That was the point, to leave clues and to invite her second, sensing brain to fill in the gaps. And then there was the graffiti in town.&nbsp;	“Cat got your tongue?”, and MEOW stretched down lamp posts and mailboxes, sometimes the letters flipped backwards. “Cat’s out of the bag”, she had thought that day.&nbsp;		A mad scientist. A genius. Her genius. Her beloved watcher; her most feared nightmare. It was genius really, what he had done. She recalled his extreme views on humanity. His appreciation for the animal kingdom. But where did that leave her? A hybrid model for a new species, caught in a cycle of nonlinear time.&nbsp;		She considered calling the number back but remembered that it was her number that he had called from, perhaps him. How did he do that? She circled the apartment a few times, caught as if in a web. Then she settled on the sofa and began scratching at her scalp, a habit she had picked up recently, as if she was trying to open her crown to let more light in. She licked the back of her hand and used the saliva to wet down a curl that had come loose and frizzy from the braid she wore on her head. “Careful,” she thought, “don’t let anybody catch you doing that in public”.&nbsp;		Her vision normalized with the repetitive gesture and her breathing balanced.&nbsp;This enlightenment thing was not a walk in the park. It was amazing though at how fast she recovered from interruptions like this now that she knew. She was calm now; beyond humanly possible.&nbsp;	She rubbed at the injection points in her arm; they had scabbed over and were itchy. She had put the pieces together a few months ago: the hairballs she began to cough up, how the smell of tuna made her shake with pleasure. She knew what was in those injections: Oliver, his dead cat.&nbsp;		She had never liked his cat. But he had.

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Meow

EmmaJane

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Meow

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Emma Conde

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