#4

The thunder and lightning from the storm outside had lulled me into a kind of stupor. Well, that and the beer.

Because of this, it barely registered when the cat came in. What did register was how the bar fell silent in two heartbeats. The silence stemmed from two extraordinary facts about the cat in question:

1. He stood on two legs and walked about like a person.
2. He was wearing a brown bowler hat with a canary feather stuck in the band.

Make that three extraordinary facts, the third being that he then spoke to us.

“What are you all looking at? Drink your beer and mind your own damn business.”

I did neither. Instead, I watched the cat walk over to the bar and jump onto the stool next to mine. I stared at him like I stared at Joanna Henry in 3rd grade.

The bartender came over. “The perils of being an anthropomorphic cat, right Jerry? Everyone keeps ignoring me.” The bartender smiled. “Milk?”

“You know it, Jer,” the cat said. The bartender nodded and went to get the milk, like that was the most normal request in the world.

Next the cat turned to me. “Hey human,” he said, looking me squarely in the face. “Close your mouth if you know what’s good for you.”

I closed my mouth, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the yellow canary feather that was stuck in the little bowler hat on top of the cat’s head.

The bartender came back with a small dish and a glass bottle of milk from the fridge. He poured the milk into the dish with a flourish and set it in front of his customer. He then placed the bottle next to the dish.

The cat was still talking to me. “You seem stupid enough,” he said. “You want to make an easy five bucks a day for the next 30 days?”

“Huh?” I replied.

“Well do you or don’t you?” the cat insisted.

“Sure, what’s the job?” I stammered. My brain was stuck in first gear. It just kept repeating, “You’re talking to a cat, weirdo,” over and over again.

“Join my expedition. We’re headed to the top of the mountain. You in?”

The information the cat related was just starting to sink in. Five dollars a day? Thirty days of work guaranteed? Hell yes, I was in, even if my new boss was a cat. I nodded enthusiastically.

“Then go home and sober up. We leave at dawn.”

About Prompt-A-Day: The rules are simple. Every day, I generate a prompt using Story Shack’s awesome writing prompt generator. Then I set a timer for one hour. At the end of the hour, I post what I’ve got. Sometimes it’s decent. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes I fail at the prompt. Sometimes I do okay. I do not edit, unless I find a typo, because I can’t help fixing those. Feel free to join in and post a link to your writing in the comments.