Once upon a time, in the mountainous land of Slovakia there lived two orphans. Well, I’m twenty-four, I think I qualify more as a guy without parents rather than a classic orphan, but if you rubbed some ash on Tomko’s cheeks he would definitely give off an Oliver Twist vibe. Regardless of classification, our parents died in a fire last summer.
Luckily, to use the term very loosely, while our parents burnt with all of the family’s earthly possessions Tomko was out in a summer camp learning about wood carving and reading maps. One moment I was living the exciting life of a bartender in Prague, a city where even budgeting for one person is a hassle, and the next I was Tomko’s legal guardian. I moved back to the town where our charred home made the neighborhood depressing, plunged my savings into a deposit and first month’s rent and started the exciting life of being a single dad. Tomko was fourteen, pushing on fifteen, I could handle four years of acting like an adult, right?
Wrong. The first two months broke me. Happiness and stability were never really prominent in my deck, but finding out about my parents burned the entire set of cards. I was meant to take care of Tomko, be the adult in his life, but really it was the other way around. I got us the apartment, I collected the government assistance checks, but Tomko did all the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking and in the evenings he would sit by my bed and talk to me. He’d make me feel better; he’d make it all bearable.
Some days, when the mental fog got particularly thick, thoughts came in that were particularly hard to let go of. This is no way for Tomko to live, just drop him off with one of the religious aunts. Give him a life where he doesn’t have to take care of your catatonic ass and then drive off a cliff or something. I’d do my best to push the thought out, but it would worm its way back within minutes. It was always in the back of my mind in one way or another, I guess, but I fully knew that there was no way I would act on it. The aunts would feed Tomko on a steady diet of bibles and I wasn’t going to let that happen. I also wasn’t going to make Tomko go to another funeral.
Whenever the abandonment/suicidal tendencies started to pipe up I would do my best to use them as fuel, I would take those thoughts as something to disprove, something that I had to act against no matter how persistent they got. This worked about 10 % of the time, but it was during one of these chance boosts of motivation that I decided to scroll through the Facebook Odd Jobs section.
NEED CAT SITTER FOR DATE NIGHT
Cabin outside of Divoké Mačice
Food provided
3,000 €
Six Cats
I don’t like cats. There’s something off about the way that they look at you. A dog’s expression you can read right away, the thing on their mind is usually food. A cat, however, is a complete mystery, you look into those slitted eyes and you don’t see relatable emotions, you see galaxies of mysterious animalistic energy. I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable. I immediately commented my name offering up my services as a cat-sitter.
Three grand was three grand. That was a couple months worth of rent, that was new clothes for both of us, that was money that could get me on my feet. I made my way over to the kitchen to share the good news. Tomko seemed genuinely happy to see me out of the bedroom before noon, he had some news of his own, with excited cracks of puberty in his voice he announced that his TikTok audience was growing steadily enough that he could bring in some money being an influencer. We celebrated each other’s sure-fire paths to cash and then I went back to the computer to check up on the progress of my cat-sitting application.
THIS POST HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR BREAKING COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
I refreshed the page a dozen times, hoping that something was simply wrong with the Internet, but the text read loud and clear. A familiar shiver traveled through my chest. You’re a moron; obviously that was a fake job offer. Go drop off Tomko with the aunts and then ride your shitty car into a burning inferno. My eyes welled up. I refreshed the page again. The text didn’t change. I wept at my computer desk like an idiot. I couldn’t take it anymore, I didn’t want to be the butt of some twisted cosmic joke, I wanted to be a normal person who’s head is filled up with normal things. And then, as tears covered the screen, my phone lit up.
A Facebook messenger call. Unknown user.
“Hello?” I picked up the phone. On the other side I could hear a voice draped in static, it was saying something but I could barely hear it; the spectre of an old person with a smartphone. “You have to bring it closer to your ear,” I said, getting a faint memory of phone calls with my dad.
“Is this better?” a confused old lady inquired way too loudly.
“Yes, I can hear you now,” I replied.
“Are you the peasant who offered to look after my cats?” She punctuated the word with cheeriness, as if she was trying to assure me that she meant no disrespect, she was simply pointing out my status in life. I rolled with it; my internal monologue called me considerably worse things on a regular basis.
“Yes, that’s me! I left a comment on your post. Is the job still available?” I asked, wiping the mixture of snot and tears off my face and putting on the cheeriest tone I could.
“Well that depends, peasant, do you like cats?”
“Boy do I!” I exclaimed, “Cats are by far my favorite animal! I used to cat sit for my friends all the time.” I was sitting at my desk wearing a dirty hoodie and old underwear but over the phone I must’ve sounded like I was wearing a fancy turtle neck and slacks… or whatever people who cat-sit wear.
“This is good peasant, I am convinced. My home is at the edge of Divoké Mačice, it is the cottage with the chicken legs.”
“The chicken legs?”
“Ah, you will understand when you see it peasant, you will understand. So, can I expect you to look after my cats while I go see my gentleman caller?”
A dozen questions floated through my head. I asked the most important one: “It’s three thousand euros for the evening?”
“That is enough, yes, peasant? I pay a high price because I expect a job well done.”
“Okay,” I said, baffled by my good fortune, “You chose the right man for the job. I love cats!” I quickly added, just in case she was planning on changing her mind.
“Very good, and peasant, do come to my home hungry. I have cooked porridge and I do not want it to go to waste.” She hung up. Or she thought she hung up, all I could hear from the other side of the phone was strange rustling. I got violent flashbacks to my father’s handling of his cellphone. I hung up.
The Tatras are a beautifully terrifying mountain range. They’re pretty enough to be put on post-cards, shirts and whatever other chachskies the tourists will eat up, but if you stare at those snow peaked crowns for long enough you start to feel small. Those towering giants will proudly remind you just how tiny you are in the grand scheme of things, how they have stood there before you, how they will stand there after you and how if you stood anywhere near the peaks without proper equipment you’d be dead by sundown. It doesn’t help that the roads that surround the mountains are on freakishly steep hills, the kind of place where a millisecond of micro-sleep will send you tumbling down into a fiery death. You’re riding a horrible tight-wire made of road with an ever present reminder of your insignificance; it’s difficult not to get dizzy.
Whenever I was behind the wheel on those roads, even before the fire, there was always an ugly shiver in my lungs. Just drive off, just roll on down, let it all burn. Yet as I drove to Divoké Mačice those thoughts were nowhere to be found. The only thing that was keeping me company was the rumble of the engine and the bits of static filled folk from the radio.
“Is something wrong?” I audibly mumbled, unaccustomed to driving without self-destructive thoughts. We’ll see, my lungs answered.
It was a forty five minute drive, as the trees grew thicker and the hills grew steeper the other cars slowly disappeared. The border was somewhere close, as I drove my phone started to manically switch between welcoming me to Poland and then welcoming me to Slovakia, it didn’t shut up until we were out of cell tower reception. It’s not like I needed a GPS, there was only one road and it led straight to Divoké Mačice.
I could pick out the chicken legs as soon as I saw the cottage. The house was indistinguishable from the hundreds of humble wooden homes that littered the Slovakian countryside with one exception; it stood, a meter or two, off the ground with the support of logs that looked undeniably like chicken legs. The cottage was right at the edge of a particularly steep hill so parking rustled my nerves a bit but soon enough I was knocking on the front door.
“Ah! Yes, the peasant, come inside, come inside. But be quick! Do not leave the door open for too long, the cats might get ideas!”
There was a small cat flap embedded in the bottom of the door, if a cat truly desired to leave the house it should have been able to do so, but I didn’t let my mind grab ahold of the absurdities. I kept focused on the money and my faux love of cats.
The eyebrows were the first thing that popped out at me, she was an old lady through and through, stringy wisps of white hair, skin like a deflated balloon but her eyebrows were painted a dark, disturbing red. “Welcome, peasant, welcome! Thank you for coming on such short notice.” She clasped my hand in a handshake that felt like sandpaper, her nails, much like her eyebrows, were painted an obnoxious shade of red.
The eyebrows were so distracting that it took me a good minute before I realized she had a glass eye. I assured her of my love of cats and stared at her one good eye trying to not be weird. She didn’t seem particularly concerned with my qualifications for cat sitting; instead she was obviously giddy about her evening plans.
“How do I look? Do I look enjoyable?” She batted those horrible crimson face-wings at me. I tried to figure out how to answer that horribly loaded question, but I just ended up nodding.
“Well that is because I had my eyebrows done, tonight is a special night. The man I am meeting tonight, oh-ho-ho, I will not be needing the company of the cats anymore! ” She laughed a horrible creaking laugh, revealing the few teeth she had left. A part of me was happy that people in their twilight years can still have a love life, but a much bigger part of me, the part of me that likes to sleep at night, knew that if I pressed the subject further I would have horrible images seared into my brain until the end of time. I did not press the subject further. Instead, I asked to see the cats.
They were fat. So horribly fat, all five of them, they rolled around on the floor looking like hairy melons with toothpicks for limbs. She was a crazy cat lady all right.
“They have been fed, so do not dare give them any more food. These creatures are obedient, if you leave them be they will simply sleep,” she pointed to a group of black and gray cats that lay in some sort of insulin infused daze by the bed, “It’s this one that you have to look out for,” the old lady said as she fished a striped orange cat from under the table.
The cat looked like a live action version of Garfield, if Garfield’s obesity had been less endearing and more troubling. There was something else other than hatred for Monday in those eyes. That cat was pleading with me. I promised myself I would call animal control as soon as I was in cellphone range. Being someone who tends to break promises, I knew if she offered return work the authorities wouldn’t be involved.
“They are strange creatures, sluggish, moody, but they keep me company,” she said with a sort of wistfulness in her voice you only hear from old people, “But maybe tonight is the night. Tonight is the night that I will fall in love.” She battered those horrid monstrosities on her forehead and walked me over to the kitchen.
The porridge she had in the pot smelled heavenly. I ate before I got in the car, scared that whatever food she had in her home would have been cooked under the influence of senility but looking at that porridge made me hungry all over again. “Remember, peasant,” she said, closing the pot, “Do not offend my cooking, when I come home I want none of this porridge left. No one is allowed to leave my home without being fattened up. And do not be an animal, before you eat the porridge light a fire, there is wood in the basket and newspapers beneath the stove.”
“And the money?” I heard myself say.
“Ah yes, the money.” She fished out three crisp five hundred euro notes and passed them to me. I had never held a five hundred before. “You will get the rest tomorrow morning when I return from my meeting.” She winked. It looked as if a scarlet eagle was about to tear out her one good eye.
She called me peasant a couple more times, then bid her goodbyes and left the cottage. She hopped on the bicycle like a proper Slavic grandma and drove off down those horrible hill roads.
I held the three notes in my sweaty hands. They seemed real enough and the lady seemed crazy enough to give me more but somewhere in my chest a voice rattled. Something is wrong. I looked at the catatonic cats in the bedroom. No, not that. I turned my attention to the orange cat; he was clawing at the old newspapers beneath the stove. No, not that. Something about the house is off.
That’s when it hit me. The interior of the cottage was just like any of the other village houses you could find in Slovakia; the wooden furniture was chipped enough to suggest it’s been passed down a couple generations, there were old photographs that dated back to the Nazis and the Soviets that let you see the morose faces of those generations, but there was something missing, something that was a staple of every room in a rural household.
“Huh, no Jesus,” I mumbled to myself.
Weird, right? You met the one person in the countryside who doesn’t use the crucifix as a decoration aid. The walls that would usually hold the statuettes of a sad shirtless man instead had strange framed chalk drawings. Faint outlines of dark figures danced beneath a glowing moon with cats running between their feet. I clutched the money in my hands for comfort.
MEOW!
The orange cat was at my feet, with a torn bit of newspaper in its mouth. Out of the cat’s jaws a black and white picture of a chubby cheery man dressed in hiking gear stared back at me.
FAMILY PLEADS FOR INFORMATION ABOUT MISSING MUSHROOM ENTHUSIAST
I took the newspaper out of the cat’s mouth, crumpled it up and chucked it in the stove. I wasn’t meant to be feeding the cats, I was meant to be feeding myself. With some extra newspapers and some logs I got a fire started, within minutes the house filled with the intoxicating smell of delicious porridge. The Garfield-looking creature kept on staring at me, kept on meowing as if it wanted something from me, but I blocked it out. Instead I sat down on the couch and got lost in my thoughts.
It’s funny, in a sad sort of way, but the same shiver in my chest that haunts me with the recurring, intrusive thoughts is the same part of me that weaves memories so palpable that I disconnect from my body. Those memories are usually haunts; thoughts of arguments with exes, of disappointing social performances in middle school, of angsty teenage outbursts, but as I sat on that couch, the smell of oats soothing my mind, I was transported to a happier place. I was back in the forest picking blueberries with my mother, smoking cigarettes on the balcony and talking about girls with my dad, helping Tomko film TikToks about drunk dinosaurs.
Memories of Tomko gave me pause. The kid was so kind, so happy, so responsible and dependable. I couldn’t comprehend how the two of us were related. I found myself thinking that maybe I was adopted, that maybe there was a switch-up at the hospital and somewhere out there were two very unstable parents taking care of Tomko’s little brother. Was I adopted? I wanted to call up my mom and ask, perhaps in a joking way, but ask nonetheless. Then I remembered she was no longer alive. She burned to death. Burned.
I snapped out with that thought. The fire had gone out. It was dark now. I had somehow managed to stare at a wall for hours without moving an inch. Pathetic.
Crrrrkkk, Crrrrrkkk
The sound of sliding ceramic could be heard from the stove. The orange cat was propped up against the bricks, licking the inside of the pot with the porridge. I rushed over to the stove and lifted the cat away but the damage was done. There was no more porridge left. Wow, congratulations, you did specifically what you were told not to do. You fed the cat.
The moonlight bounced off those glassy eyes.
Meow.
The cat wanted something from me, but I was in no position to try to decipher its needs. I laid back down on the couch, exhausted by my inability to get anything done right. The voice in my chest grew to a deafening volume, it demanded that I get in my car, drive back home to drop off the money, get back in my car and crash. I fought it with every inch of my soul; I kept on trying to push myself towards thinking about literally anything else. I don’t know how long I struggled, time dilated into one long neurotic monologue that seeped away at every ounce of energy I had in me, but eventually sleep came. A hollow, dreamless sleep cloaked in heart palpitations.
I struggled to breathe. There was a pressure on my lungs. She was squatted over my chest, but this was not the crazy cat lady I had met before. The eyebrows had been wiped off and only faint traces of wispy hair remained, and her glass eye shined with a dreadful, bloody glow.
“You didn’t eat your porridge, peasant.” There was no joy in her voice this time. She pronounced the word peasant with the same intonation most people pronounce the word tapeworm.
“Wha? I ate the porridge! It was deli-“
“LIAR!” She screamed, her red nails curled into fists, “How dare you lie to me, peasant? How dare you disrespect me in my own home?”
“I’m not lying! I-“
She pointed towards the floor, her bony finger shaking with rage. Even in the dark I could see the faint outlines of the orange cat, but it was no longer a cat, it had gained so much weight that it was simply an amorphous orange blob. “You let him eat the porridge. You disobeyed me, peasant.”
The orange glob on the floor struggled under its own weight. “How was your date?” I tried changing the topic.
The hag scoffed, pressing down her knees on my chest. “I do not need him. No, I do not need anyone else. I have my cats peasant, and they keep me company.” She smiled, the wet remnants of her teeth shining in the dark. “And once I make you nice and plump with some porridge you will join the cats, you will join the hikers and the mushroom pickers and the other desperate peasants who have stumbled into my cottage. You will keep me warm on the cold winter nights.”
“I would like to go home now,” I said as I tried to get her off my chest. Yet as much as I would wiggle, as much as I would push, her knees simply dug deeper into me.
“You will stay,” she said with an air of calm. From the corner of my eye I could see a sea of slitted green orbs; the other fat cats were watching us. The hag took a deep breath and screamed, “You will stay!”
The glass ball in her eye-socket burst forth a flood of light. My body froze. That color, that hateful hue of crimson, it did something to me. The same sensation that would keep me in bed until noon was back in my body, but where my depressive tendencies were a quiet jingle of suffering the witch delivered a demented symphony of hopelessness. I could feel myself slipping. I could feel myself breaking. I had to act.
I punched her in the jaw. I know this isn’t something that I should be proud of but the right hook I delivered to the eighty year old woman sent her fragile body clattering to the floor. I dashed towards the front door, car keys already in hand.
The mountain air outside tasted of freedom, I could have been in my car in a couple of strides, yet as I slammed the door behind me a bony hand grabbed at my ankle through the cat-flap. The old hag dug her scarlet nails into my skin, I could feel a warm trickle of blood travel down towards my socks.
“You are not going anywhere you filthy peasant!” She yelled from behind the door. Her grip was strong enough to send me crashing to the ground, the wood of the porch sent a stinging pain through my skull. “You will be my cat! You will keep me company! Just like the others! You will be with me forever!” Her voice grew dark, it echoed through the mountains “ČÁÁÁÁRY MÁÁÁRY FUK!”
Suddenly a fuzzy wave of weakness shot through my limbs. Something was wrong. Something was happening to me. A feeling of weakness and fragility consumed me, an inhuman sensation traveled down my spine. She was pulling me in. My foot was covered in blood and halfway through the cat door.
“No one gets away from me peasant! You will be with me until the day you die! You are my-“ a wave of Meows rose from the other side of the door. Suddenly the hag’s grip loosened. “Get away from me you vermin! I will punish all of you for this! Get away from me!”
I freed my foot thanks to whatever struggle was happening on the other side of the door. I ran to my car, locked myself in, turned the ignition and that’s when I noticed it.
My arms were covered in a steadily thickening layer of gray fur, my clothes were starting to clump up around me, that strange sensation in my spine was a tail; I was turning into a cat. Shit, I thought this is not good.
I tried to keep my foot on the pedal, but my limbs kept on getting shorter, my vision became obstructed by my sweat drained shirt. My clothes piled up around me, my thumbs were gone, my limbs receded into furry paws; there was no way that I could operate a vehicle. Just when it seemed like things couldn’t get worse, like I had reached the ultimate rock bottom of the human experience, the door to the cottage burst open.
“COME BACK HERE YOU VERMIN!” Blood was dripping down the hag’s face; she was covered in scratches and filled with rage. Within seconds she was slamming her bloody fists against the window. Her glass eye painted the inside of the car a bloody red. I hid by the pedals.
I kept on spinning around in one place. I don’t know what came over me, but it felt as if I keeping my body in motion would help me come up with a means of escape. Only one solution presented itself, a familiar voice spoke within me Drive off a cliff. Let’s end this once and for all.
She slammed the window with such fervor that it became obvious that the glass would not hold. For a couple of seconds I desperately searched for a different solution, but in the blood red glow of her false eye I could only find one answer. I pressed my body against the gas pedal.
I woke up curled up in the backseat of a totaled Škoda Fabia. The car bounced down the hill so many times that it looked more like a modern art installation rather than a vehicle, it was absolutely ruined but I was, miraculously, whole. One life down, eight to go.
I crawled out from beneath the wreckage. The sun was rising off behind the mountains, birds were chirping in the forest, the place at the top of the hill where the cottage once stood was empty.
I was dazed and beyond confused, a part of me just wanted to lie in the grass and think about the whole cursed affair but something in the back of my head wouldn’t let me. Go home. One paw in front of the other. Tomko needs you.
The journey back home took a good three days. Not only were my new limbs significantly worse at traveling long distances, but I had to stop to satiate my newly found feline hunger. The first sparrow I killed was because I was starving; from that point onwards I would slaughter any bird that got in my way. The whole journey filled me with a strange sort of purpose.
I had to get to Tomko as soon as I could, yet as the Tatra Mountains came into full view I couldn’t help but to stop and take them in for a spell. Somehow, those majestic peaks looked a lot less intimidating when viewed from all fours. They were no longer terrifying reminders of how small I was, they were simply there, a part of the same insane world in which I was living.
Tomko, being Tomko, took me in as a stray after less than a day of following him. I watched him set out an extra plate for the microwaved pizza that he would eat every night, I was with him when he called the police, he took me along when he moved into our bible-thumping aunt's house.
Tomko’s TikToks have gotten quite a bit of traction as of late, he tells everyone that it’s because he has an insanely talented cat, but I know that it’s because he is a naturally funny person. Either way, I think that the kid has a very bright future laid out for him.
As for me, well, the world is a lot less intimidating from where I stand. All I do all day is sleep, act in TikTok videos and keep Tomko company. I still hear the shiver in my chest, but it’s considerably calmer now. Don’t feel much of a need to argue with it either, all it tends to say is lick yourself or get that door open or, on the truly boring days: murder that bird. This feline life ain’t bad at all.
This post has been quite difficult to write out with my paws, getting the accented letters down has been particularly difficult, but I wanted to make sure to let people know that if they see someone offering an absurd amount of money for a simple cat-sitting job to report the post for being a scam.
Hope everyone is well. There’s some really crazy TikTok's coming.