It starts out like a usual Tuesday afternoon, eating strawberries and brown sugar as I make my daily donations of food to the District 11 soup kitchen and clothing to the District 8 orphanage, but then something a little peculiar occurs.
"Grandad!" an unfamiliar blonde girl screams as she runs towards me, wrapping her arms around my waist.
"You're not my grandaughter," I laugh, patting her fondly on the head. She seems unpertubed by this statement, however, so I myself decide to ignore the fact also. Eventually, after what feels like an hour at minimum, she pulls away from me with a giggle.
Producing a large box from behind her back that somehow went unnoticed during our extended hug, she grins and says, "I brought you a cat." Puzzled once again, I take the box from her hands and go to open it. At this moment, however, she begins to panic and snatches the box back off me. "No!" she shouts angrily. "You mustn't open it, not ever!"
I blink rapidly. "What?"
"Buttercup is Schrödinger's now. Not yours."
"Schrödinger's?" I ask, perplexed yet again.
"Zombie cat," she explains, and I begin to awkwardly laugh at her weird joke, though when she follows it up with the words, "Possibly. I'm not sure. Alive, dead, undead... they're all the same, really," I stop chuckling and begin to worry.
Taking a step back, I mutter, "You're not sane, child," and she overhears, looking at me with tears in her wide eyes almost instantly.
"I am, Grandad," she laughs, dropping the cat box and treading on it as she runs to hug me once again. If that cat was alive before, I think, it definitely isn't now. "Meow!"
Shocked, I turn to the squished cat box, and realise that yes, that cat is dead, and turn instead to the smiling child. "Meow!" she repeats, pointy teeth now on show. She rubs her face with her little ginger paws - wait, paws? - and long whiskers appear beneath. "Meoooow!" She walks backwards a couple of feet on suspiciously short legs, twirls, and a tail rips the back of her frilly primrose yellow dress. When she twirls in the other direction, she appears to shrink a lot and when she is looking up at me again her face is covered in ginger fur. I blink and her human ears have been replaced with ginger furry not-so-human ones.
She crawls out of the dress that was starting to cover almost her entire body, and leaps onto me, claws digging into my arm. "Meoooooooooow!" she yells, eyes furious for some reason. I push her off me a little too hard, and as she hits the floor, her new ginger fur starts to fall out, revealing green peeling skin where soft pink skin once was.
There's a new box in the corner of the room that I never noticed before, which she crawls into, limbs now altogether devoid of fur dropping off as she goes. She tumbles into the box, somehow closing it behind her, and only then do I begin to understand that now she is the zombie cat.