“Get a life without the sky, Fang.”

Brinkly greeted her the same every morning, he did not trust any weather. While the other cats in the alley never regarded anything above their heads, he was always suspicious of the glaring sun. 

He eyed it with wonder, but after a moment would turn away, as if it could look back.

Brinkley could spend hours debating the wind “It doesn’t make sense, Fang.” He told her, “Why is it doing that? It doesn’t have to do that. All of the time? It just never ends? There’s always wind somewhere? And that’s supposed to be normal? Do you ever think about it?”

Now that the same alley was filled with a torrent of fire, intensified by the heavy wind, she wished that she had listened. 

Thick, tarlike smoke filled her lungs, forcing the Fang of the alley to rely on her nose. She could paint a vision through her other keen senses, but that vision didn’t fit with any logic she knew.

None of this should happen. They were a bunch of stray cats. Why would anyone target an isolated alley?

With a horrible realization, she recognized the smell of blood and her family’s burning fur. Beneath this stench was an unfamiliar odor permeating the alley’s narrow furnace. 

A giant creature shimmered beyond her sight, coated in a reptilian scent. It was a foreign entity, the unctuous smell coated the back of her throat.

“What are you?” She hissed between coughs in a language it could not understand. “I’m the Queen of this alley. I’m the Fang!”

In response, it opened it’s jaws. Smoke billowed off of it’s dragon teeth in spiraling plumes, each incisor came close enough to her she could see them tower through the fire above her head.

The Fang was a large housecat, brown and nondescript other than one missing ear, but compared to the monster, she was as insignificant as a fly. It was certain that the creature did not regard her at all.

She had no family left, no friends, not even Brinkley by her side. No one was left to call her Fang. She was no longer Queen of her alley, she was no longer the First Bite.

Everyone was gone except for a counterfeit collar that hung around her neck with her real name scribbled on with a shaky, nearly illiterate claw: Misty. 

It was a little fake thing that helped her feel loved, as if she was born to a life of luxury, but she always knew the ornament was lie. 

Now that she was standing in front of a monster in her small urban alleyway, she could not understand how this was real either.

Her bones shook within her matted fur coat, but while she was only an alleycat, she was the last to represent her dead colony, so she continued to stand her ground for their sake.

It stepped forward with a sharp talon, snapping the concrete under it’s weight.

Surely there had to be humans that overheard this? Surely the only witness to this creature couldn’t be a stray? Misty looked over her shoulder but she heard nothing from the humans outside of her alley. It was as if time had stopped.

Anticipating her last mortal moments, she took in it’s glowing ruby eyes, which flickered white and hypnotic. They stared directly at her through the smoke, and all hope that it would ignore her and possibly leave her intact left Misty’s heart. A fear greater than all the fire of the alley overwhelmed her mind.

Misty never thought about any sort of afterlife. No cats did. That was human problems of beings that wanted to be godlike and eternal. It didn’t make any sense why a specie that lived for nearly 10 feline lifetimes would want to live any longer, and most cats didn’t live long enough to find any deeper meaning or revelation that humans claimed to have.

All she ever wanted was just to be alive, and when that was over, another could take her place. However, there was no one left to sit on her throne of cardboard boxes. Her tiny ecosystem of an alley would die.

She would be the last Fang, the last one to carry their language, their heritage, their everything.

It could not end like this.

In a blur of dreamlike senses, she heard a distant shout from behind her. The eyes of the monster quickly shifted, narrowing in at the sound that came from the street outside of the alley’s entrance. 

Misty turned around, a pair of tall human figures were looking into the alley, although it was hard to tell in the haze what they were doing.

It would be human problems that destroyed her home, it wasn’t the first time that had happened.

There was a moment of quiet, as rain began to fall in a gentle mist, horizontal from the force of the wind tunneling through the alleyway. Then, a series of unexplained horrors descended from the entrance of the alley. 

A beam of light vaulted over her head and barrelled into the beast. A sound from it’s shattering chest shook the walls of the alley; a crunch of bones, a crackle of splattering bile, and the cascading bricks of the alley that landed nearly on top of her feet.

Misty turned again, and the figures were gone. 

The horrible beast lay on it’s side, bleeding a hot torrential river where she stood. While she could barely make it out in the smoke, she could feel the tremble of it’s last breath before it died, followed by the cold of the rain.

Which was when Misty decided this was not her problem, and she never wanted to meet who’s problem this really was. No human could have done this, no machine, no animal; it could have only been a nightmare.

Misty spun around on her haunches, fleeing the alley, the fire, her home, her old life, and into the sheet of pattering rain.

****

His hands trembled from the icy mist, a pain that felt like his digits were being compressed through a vice. 

The man shoved his fingers into the armpits of his coat, a long and dark winter fleece that reached past his knees. A hood covered his face, leaving only the glints of large, watery eyes behind the shadow. His iris caught the light in a brilliant way, the gray of his eyes so reflective they seemed to glow under the low light.

The rain turned to hail, icy rocks beat on his shoulders and the back of his neck.

“Damn sky!” He hissed, upwards towards the moon. “Why do you exist!?”

His lumbering silhouette stumbled down the sidewalk in a drunken, injured criss-cross. So distracted by the cold and the pain, his legs occasionally disjointed in an alien way, a digitigrade bone structure broke through the facade of a human calf.

Desperately, he pulled out a piece of paper and a pen, milling it between his fingers as if he had not used one in years. Yet the sensations came back to him of how to grip the instrument in between his thumb and forefinger.

He huddled over it with his entire body, hoping to keep it dry as the hail subsided and turned into sleet.

Dear little Misty,

You are not one of us.

You are more than us.

We’ve lied to you for years.

I’m sorry I wrote this...I don’t think you can...read…

But you’ll have something, that’s the important thing. You’ll keep my words somewhere safe until you can really see them.

You aren’t a stray, Misty!

We kept you and told ourselves every night that were saving you, but I can’t sleep: I have these nightmares of your real life, what you could’ve been without us, without ME.

I have tried so hard to hide how I feel – and please understand – I do not love you. I regret ever knowing you.

What makes it so, so much worse, is that I know that you will be there for me, in the end, when I can’t be there for you. 

Do you know that saying that our Mothers told us? That when you die, you will fly to your reflection? I know what it means now. I know what it means and I regret EVERYTHING.

When I die, you will be there for me. You will be by my side. Misty, you are my reflection.

And I wish I could say that I was yours. I wish it with everything.

I never understood how and I hope you never understand why I am the very worst thing that could have ever happened to you. To everyone else, their collar is their life, but for you, you’ll remember us...you’ll remember...me...and I am NOT that man. 

I am dead. I am fully dead, Misty. Now, and forever, I am only a reflection of you.

-Brinkley.

He stumbled onward, a shape-shifting silhouette lumbering down the sidewalk at night. A figure like an old man, leaning so far forward to balance legs and a tail he was trying to keep hidden. A horrifying movement, ghostly, and surreal, dancing on the edge of keeping a solid form.

Brinkley made it to a parking lot across from the burning alleyway, looking up one last time at the damned sky.

He hated the sky. It would be the thing that finally killed him.

And with one gasp, his form collapsed into his robe, covering him completely except for one small cat’s paw clinging desperately to the letter that Misty could not read.