Dripping with sarcasm, Melody taunted her cat, Whiskers. The poor beast howled in reply, obviously upset by her master’s blatant disregard for  Whiskers’ aversion to dead things.

Melody held the mouse by its tail, swinging it back and forth in front of the cornered cat. “You ridiculous cat! You’re worthless. It’s just a good thing I put those mousetraps out otherwise we’d be overrun with these little pests.”

Whiskers kept tilting her head to the side, staring just past Melody. When she saw her opening between the brick wall and the swinging deceased mouse, she bolted from the corner.

“Come back you darn cat!” Melody hollered as she spun around while attempting to grab the scruff of Whiskers’ neck.

She missed and slammed her shoulder into the bricks, the only thing there to break her fall. Melody groped along the red stones in an effort to arrest her descent and caught hold of a loose brick.

No, it wasn’t a brick. It was far too squishy and as her fingers dug in, they seemed to disappear entirely. Melody screamed and released the brick, but in that brief span of time the changes had already started to occur. It was too late. Melody disappeared, dead mouse and all.

She was falling through space, through time, with no end. Her screams tore at her throat but nothing could be heard in the space around her. And space is was, literal space: stars, comets, moons, planets, all whizzing by at breakneck speeds. She was surrounded by a Cosmic display of brilliance leaving her in utter terror.

Melody released her death grip on the mouse and was caught by the sight of it drifting languidly through the cosmos as though taking a relaxing float at the beach. “What is this?” She mouthed the words to herself, now all alone.

Time had no beginning and no end for her here, slipping through the vast expanse of eternal night highlighted by the cosmic display of brilliance. The horror of it all was rooted in her complete singularity. Her life became a black hole.

After an immeasurable amount of time a faint sound hummed in the unending distance of space. Melody’s head swung back and forth in an effort to find the source of the irritating screech that continued to grow in intensity. Her cosmic hell grew worse by the second.

Space seemed to implode in slow motion. The stars closed in around her, their shimmering cosmic light tickling her face and arms. She thrashed about and began to hear her own screams. The light grew brighter, and Melody laid her arms across her face to block it out.

“Yowwwlllll!!!” the cat screamed, landing on Melody’s face.

She sat up with a scream of her own, disoriented and terrorized. Whiskers continued to claw her way around Melody. The young girl jumped from her bed to escape the scratching peskiness of her cat.

The next thing she knew, Whiskers flipped her head around proudly displaying her most recent catch: a plump little gray mouse, dangling by its tail.

“Oh, Whiskers, you naughty thing!” With great reluctance, Melody took the dead mouse from her cat’s jaws and flung it out the window. “Come here my perfect mouser.” She picked up Whiskers and gave her a good rub down the back and under her chin. “I must tell you, Whiskers. I had the strangest dream . . . .”