a return to the house of death

It was a house of death, they’d said, and laughed about it when they first moved in. They’d had a couple of cats then but both had died within a week or so of moving, one crushed flat by a falling bookcase – which, although empty of the books which had not yet been unpacked was still of notable weight due to the quality of the materials involved in its construction, especially compared to the soft bones and other associated viscera that made up a cat – and the other stabbed by a large kitchen knife, largest of a set of five, that it had managed to pull from a breadboard on the kitchen work surface whilst attempting to climb onto same, and that had fallen blade down to the linoleum floor and clean through the centre of the cat’s little body. They had found it like that, a strange kebab, having pulled itself out of the kitchen and part of the way down the hall with its two front paws before dying by the living room door, a smeared trail of blood drawn behind it. They buried the two cats in the garden, alongside what appeared to be some other minimally marked pet’s graves from previous residents, modest stone memorials that flanked a dormant if immense fire pit.

Although it was certainly sad they felt a certain relief regardless, for they had purchased the cats on a drunken whim when they were really too young to be burdened by the responsibility of pet custodianship, and so despite the shock and also the guilt of the situation they were quietly pleased that the cats were gone but had suffered little (if some), and the notion of the house of death was a good conversational gambit at the abundance of housewarming parties they all of a sudden found themselves expected to organise, and like the most meagrely qualified tour guides of the murderous places in all the big cities that feeds into the human hunger for pain they showed their morbid friends and partners the locations of the cats last moments, the chink in the lino where the knife hit, the dull stain beneath the now full bookcase, the still-identifiable blood streak that arced from kitchen to living room like a prophetic arrow of the doom that waited.