Viral sat in his bathtub, steaming water lapping at his skin and light blond hair in a mess around his crown. Bunched up against the linoleum and sharp teeth gaping.
There was a bottle of expensive wine in his hand, deep in color and half empty. The label was damp, because he was damp, with a heart washed up in misery and golden cat's eyes saturated in boredom.
Viral had just come from his assistant's funeral. She had worked for him a grand part of her life, probably about seventy years. He played witness as time drew wrinkles all over her face, broke down her knees, and pressed a lump into her back. As it took her hair and turned it grey, it eventually slowed her heart down to a stop.
He barely knew her. In fact, he could hardly remember her name. The entire day was kept in a fog, clear memories occasionally jabbing out of it. Like the richly colored mahogany coffin and the little flakes of snow drifting on down from a blanket gone deep grey. The faces of those few humans came too-they shook his hand and thanked him, trying so hard not to stare at his saw-like teeth and enormous hands.
The whole affair was awkward. Like a dance no one really wanted to attend. The assistant didn't have a husband. Not because she had never married. He died last year at ninety-two. Viral remembered this because she came in miserable.
Why hadn't she retired?
An enormous swig was taken from the bottle, some of it spilling onto that pale chin, only to be left in place due to relentless apathy. The water began to cool, and he found himself once again in the grips of the cat woman. She tended to come up whenever Viral was neck deep in melancholy. It was difficult to say if she was a hallucination, or a phantom that truly did come in and out whenever his core sunk deep into his stomach.
She was his imaginary lover. Her hair was long and yellow, joined by two sweet chocolate eyes and a pair of cat ears sitting upon her head. She glittered like gold, dainty and fragile and kind. Thin fingers would brush past the beast man's neck soft-the enormous scar against his chest. The frame of his face.
His lips.
She only arrived at his worst-when the tortured thing was wrought in steaming hot water and ready to give up on all things, when he was as close to dreams as he could be-because those horrific claws would never touch rest.
Viral hadn't slept in eighty years.
But between the tub and the flavor of sweet wine, he came close. At least what would be "close".
And when the water grew cold and the liquor was gone, Viral removed himself from the vat and wrapped his sore body in a towel. The woman disappeared, and his mind was left to the unsettling blackness in his stomach and the putrid thoughts of a tomorrow he never fucking wanted.
A new assistant was coming-one he didn't bother interviewing. In the end, they were all the same. Flawed in one way or another-stretching through the government documents with sticky notes and chicken scratch doodled into the margins.
Viral landed at his desk.
And he addressed his mountain of paper.
