the archivists, part i - K

Geoffrey's cat had never been much more than ordinary. She was largely white with patches of gray-ish tiger-looking stripes, a very pink nose, and eyes that appeared to grow larger when she was about to maul his low-hanging elbow while he worked. Generally, he failed to notice this until it was too late and his elbow was in tatters, but that did not change the fact that it was a very good warning sign.

Geoffrey had a great deal of work to do that day. He was fiddling with a website for a very impatient, very finicky woman who was in the business of selling knit hats and making unusually terrible design decisions ("But Comic Sans looks so friendly!"). He was not sure what self-respecting person would buy a knit hat from a website written in Comic Sans, but as long as he was getting paid, he supposed he could grit his teeth and bear it.

Being very busy, it was natural that his cat (who was sometimes called Clarice but was very often called other things) should be doing every single thing Geoffrey dearly wished she wouldn't. She chewed the houseplants, knocked over the kitchen trash, jumped up the walls chasing spots of light, and, of course, played scratch tag with his elbows. He ignored her as well as he could, which was also very natural, until he was forced to submit when she leapt on to his desk and pranced across his keyboard.

It was not until he moved to shove her back to the floor that he noticed she was in two pieces. She landed with a whump on the carpet, as though she were not in two pieces at all, and began to lick her paw.

Geoffrey leaned back in his chair and stared. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, but when his spectacles were back in place, the situation had not changed.

It was not as though one half of Clarice was at his feet and the other was across the room, but as though the two pieces of her, usually seen as one seamless whole, had been misaligned when they were joined together. Her head and shoulders appeared fine, but everything that came after was slightly too far to the left.

Geoffrey thought about yelling. Not for help, as he was quite alone in the apartment (save, of course, for Clarice), but because he felt the noise might shatter whatever illusion he was witnessing. Or at least make him feel better about having to witness it.
He tried. It did neither.

Clarice looked up at him and mewed. Geoffrey's head landed on the keyboard when he lost consciousness, and a long row of B's stretched across the screen.