As of now the cats are quiet. Maybe they’re asleep. Maybe they’ve moved on from the sidewalk outside my front door to catch a mouse for breakfast. Is that a thing that cats really do, catch mice for breakfast? Fry them up with eggs to make their mouse omelets? Or do they simply feast on whatever isn’t rotting in an alley? The cats who lounge outside my apartment at night are demons straight from Hell so nothing would surprise me.

At night I hear the cats mewling. It starts with QB1, the alley cat who’s called this neighborhood home long before I moved in. Am I the interloper? Is that how he sees me? I don’t really care, I’d just like him to shut up. Back to the beginning of this paragraph: QB1 stalks the edges of my home, meowing to alert his friends to his presence. “I’m here. It’s time to begin our ghoulish ceremony.” He repeats this sentence for close to an hour before the others arrive. When his fellow cats come to his side it’s all at once as if they dropped out of the sky or teleported into their preferred area of ritual. It would be awe inspiring if it weren’t happening feet away from my front door.

The ever growing mass of cats sits in the shape of a Maltese Cross, their faces inches away from one another, from the moment that the sun is nothing more than a glow in the western sky to the moment when the sky turns purple. The brief transition from night to day. The cats sometimes speak telepathically. About what, I don’t know. However many of their hours spent in front of my apartment are spent hissing and growling in strange accents. Maybe German? Maybe something older? I’ve stopped shooing the cats away. They return more powerful each night to continue their ritual. I’ve slowly adjusted to their presence even if they continue to make me uncomfortable. Am I under their spell? Has my nervous system adjusted to the felines? Am I smoking too much weed? I’m afraid there’s no satisfactory ending here. This is only a report from the streets of Los Angeles.

You can follow Jacob Shelton on Twitter and Instagram or read more of his work in Mindfuck or in like every issue of Kill Pretty.