13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors

  "IT'S different when you have your own," she said to me as she cooed and goo-goo-gooed over somebody else's baby. Seven months gone and my best friend was positively evangelical with pregnancy, as if the scales had fallen from her eyes and she had found a glorious new religion.

  I shouldn't worry.

  "Your maternal instinct will kick in soon," she tells me. "When you feel a life inside you, it changes you. Every woman has the instinct, you wait, it'll happen."

  I had a cat once. Not the same, I know, but I loved this cat; she was my friend. We'd go on the prowl together. She'd comfort me when I was sad-taught me things, that animal. She used to bring me "gifts". Leaves and snails when she was a kitten, then when she was older it was dead things. Birds, mice, an occasional mole. Not the best gift-a crow in the toilet. I used to tell her off and eventually she stopped. Stopped with the dead stuff, that is-then it was live stuff. A chaffinch flapping round the bedroom. A vole on the floor, scared senseless while the cat kept it locked in the headlight of her proprietorial glare. There was even an angry duck once-a match for the cat, but fair play to her, she'd got it through the cat flap. God knows how. Then there was this shrew. Tiny little mite, you could see its heart beating like mad, its little legs paralysed with fear. So small-no bigger than your thumb, really. It's a wonder the cat bothered.

  That's where I got the idea.

  The cat's long dead. It would have been ridiculous to wait for the fickle fancies of a bloody cat, anyway. But you can buy these things (God bless the internet) to feed to snakes. Apparently most people don't buy live shrews-normal people prefer frozen mice. Normal people don't want to see the price of life, the exchange. One for another, ten lives, a hundred lives, a thousand. But you can buy live shrews. There are a lot of weirdos out there.

  I found a man who sells them not forty minutes' drive from my house. Phoned ahead. Bought ten for "Sissy" my pet snake (so I wouldn't look like a weirdo) and carefully took them home in a cardboard box with holes in the lid. In the house I peered into the box. Teeny little things, they were. Hardly a meal, merely a mouthful.

  The first one died. They're so little and panicky and I couldn't hold onto it properly-I don't know if I broke its neck or it died of fright or both. I just couldn't get it inside the condom, it was struggling too much.

  Nine more tries.

  But the second time was a dream after I blew the condom up a bit first. I wanted a bit of air in there, anyway.

  I rubbed butter on the outside.

  I'd always been good at taking pills.

  This was different, of course.

  It was moving, for a start. I could feel its tiny feet on my tongue-ten tiny toes! I wretched a bit. But I swallowed it all down in the end. I was frightened at first.

  What have I done?

  I relaxed. I knew this was what I wanted, knew it was worth the sickness and the discomfort. I could feel it in me, my esophagus, going down, could feel its little heartbeat, its breathing, its clawing and wriggling, felt it move into my tummy. Could I feel it kick in there? Maybe. I'd like to think so, yes. Yes-yes, I could feel it kick, because it's no one's body but my own, and I know what I felt. Life. In me.

  There. She was right. It changes everything. So I know next time I see a baby smiling up at me, its soft fatty limbs waving in tender joy, I'll look at it quite differently.

  13. THE HOUSESITTER

  Elliot Arthur Cross, United States