The walls are giving in like lungs collapsing. Plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling. Windows explode inward in a hail of icy splinters. I run to hide under the couch, but the couch is gone, instead there is a great wet mouth with broken teeth. Through the portholes there falls thunderlight. Black hands reach up from the floor. The cord is tight around my neck. It is transparent, now, the color of death. There is no scent at all, and perhaps it is that which makes me understand that I am going to die.

I think about fish, and how I will never know its taste, and I think about my beautiful tabby, and how I will never see her again. Then I think about Ted and what I did to him and I am really crying, now. I know, in the way I know my own tail, that the others are already gone. For the first time I am all alone. And soon I will be gone too.

I can feel it all, now, the body. The heart, the bones, the delicate clouds of nerve endings, the fingernails. What a moving thing a fingernail is. I see that it doesn’t matter what shape the body is, that it doesn’t have fur or a tail. It still belongs to us.

Time to stop being a kitten, I say to myself. Come on, cat. Maybe if I help the body, the others can come back.

But when I look there is a seething mass of shining blades where the front door should be. They whir and snick through the air. There is no way out there.

I’ll try up, then. At the top of the stairs, the landing and the bedroom and roof are gone. The house is open to a raging sky, the storm which beats and whirls overhead. It is made of tar and lightning. There are brouhahas with great saggy jaws, baying. They tumble and race through the clouds, eyes like points of fire.

My fur is on end, my heart pounds. Every fiber of me wants to turn, to run and hide somewhere quiet, and wait to die. But if I do that it’s over.

Be brave, cat. I put my paws on the first step, and then the second. Maybe this will be OK!

The staircase caves in with a great sound. Rubble lands all around me, and there is choking dust and ropes of the sticky black tar that burn and blind me. When the dust clears, I can only see rubble, brick. The walls are caved in, closing off the stairs. Everything is quiet. I am sealed in.

No, I whisper, tail lashing. No, no, no! But I am trapped, the crumbling house my tomb. I am finished, we are all finished.

I call on the LORD. He does not answer.