In the beginning... (original) (raw)

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Grover Cleveland was not in a good mood (not that anyone named for the 22nd and 24th United States president was prone to a particularly cheery disposition). It was a particularly Dark and Stormy Night, and nothing good ever came of nights like that. These were the sorts of nights when sophisticated dinner parties were interrupted by sudden, brief power outages, which ended to reveal that the Colonel's daughter has been murdered. Nights like these, mad scientists in their granite towers attempted unnatural feats most often involving corpses, or vicious animals, or giant aphids. And it was nights like these that poor Grover didn't get to watch movies about either of these things, what with the satellite dish unable to receive a signal.
Grover resigned himself to staring out the window. It was sleeting now. Pellets of stinging slush whipped the window pane, becoming briefly visible through Grover's somber reflection in the glass. Grover eyed himself and sighed. Awkward and skinny, fully six feet tall and only one hundred thirty pounds. Gangly limbs, thick nose, sad, sunk, dark eyes. His hair was an unmanageable mess of thin stringy strands that refused to lay flat or to curl properly, preferring to frizzle and jut in every random direction, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in lazy curls.
Lightning struck, and briefly wiped away his reflection. His backyard was illuminated for a second, all forty square feet of it, with its one scraggly oak tree and its patches of grass among rotting acorns and its tall wooden fence. A dark form seemed to be slinking along the side of the garage, visible as a black outline against the white wooden paneling along the right side of the yard.
What's Kibbles doing out there... wondered Grover, and the flash ended and the window was a black mirror again. Grover pondered over the sight for a little bit. There was definitely something amiss. The cat was terrified of thunder and hated rain. It should have been hiding under Grover's bed. Yet, the way that it moved out in the ice-cold sleet and rain suggested no discomfort whatsoever. And the more he thought on it, the more it seemed bigger than it ought to have been. Could it be a neighbor's cat? Or some wild animal?
It occurred to Grover to search the house to see if Kibbles was inside, but he was now riveted to the window, waiting for the next flash of lightning to reveal the whereabouts of this mysterious creature.

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