Miss Daisy is trying to kill me, I'm sure of it.
Exhibit one: she stalks down the hallways of my house as silent and death-like as a ghost, familiarizing herself with every little crack in the wood, each little hair that gets blown into the dark corners, so that she knows exactly what might help or hinder an escape if her plan fails. Of course, it won't, but Miss Daisy is a prudent sort of being, who always plans for every possibility.
She doesn't like being seen as she stalks—it would never do for her enemy to know just how stealthy she can be. If she rounds a corner in full stalk-mode, with her head and body low and even to the ground and her shoulder blades swinging up and down like hidden weapons under a jacket, and sees me sitting there reading my latest copy of EW, she straightens up instantly with a briefly shocked expression in her penetrating green-yellow eyes. Then she pulls herself together and rubs the length of her body seductively against the wall corner, adding a flirtatious flick of her tail. She gives me a dainty meow that says, "Hello, I expected you to be here and I am not in the slightest ashamed that you see me right now," and then she dashes up the stairs to recover her kitty dignity.
Exhibit two: This morning, I opened my eyes lazily, having just ended a wonderful dream about roses and midnight boat rides, and she was there; so close I could almost feel her tiny breaths flutter against my face like a gentle sleeping gas. Her eyes were narrowed and bore straight into mine in the default cat expression that means that they are plotting your impending and grisly demise—and enjoying it. I closed my eyes again to pretend I hadn't noticed. When I cracked them open a minute later, her own eyes were shut and she wore the other cat default expression of utter contentment that meant that she was enjoying the luxury and right of a quick cat nap. She even purred to throw me off my suspicion.
Exhibit three: She sharpens her claws faster than I can trim them. I don't know how she does it. I think she must had a claw sharpener hidden under my bed, because mere hours after a trim, she returns to me with a sweet meow and an expression that says that all is forgiven for the assault on her body if only I will scratch her behind the ears for a bit. I do, and she kneads my leg like a kitten, and inevitably, a claw "accidentally" extends and pokes me sharply through my jeans. I jerk in surprise and pain, and she looks up at me as if to say, "Oops! Did I really just do that? I am so sorry, dear…" Then she leaves because I offended her by interrupting our bonding moment.
Exhibit four: She knows my only weapon and she's not afraid of it. I keep a glass of water by my bed at night, not because I might wake up thirsty, but because if she chooses to attack me at my most vulnerable hour, I at least have something to fend her off with. But instead of waking up to razor-sharp claws, I wake up to something even more terrifying: the tiny lip lap sounds of Miss Daisy sipping down my weapon, as gruesome sounding in the dark as squelching blood and eviscerated organs, which I can imagine clearly that she would eat from my dead body with a napkin around her neck, even though she would never be so messy as to find a spare drop of blood anywhere on her pristine white fur. I open my eyes and look at her helping herself to my glass of water. She stops and turns her head toward me. "That's right," she says, "I drink your weapon of choice!" And then she paces down to the end of my bed and curls up like a good pet.
My friends think I'm crazy. I suppose I would think I'm crazy, too, but they don't live here. They don't see that joyfully malicious glint in her eye ("It's just her kitty pwide," they say, scratching her head with all the affection that lately I haven't been able to muster. "Yes it is! Yes it is!"); they don't wake up in the darkness to her quiet gaze. Miss Daisy is trying to kill me. I'm sure of it.
I was wrong: Miss Daisy was not trying to kill me. It was worse. It all began the night I became so paranoid that I put four glasses of water beside my bed. That was my fatal mistake.
I did not wake up to the sound of her feverishly (and very unkitty-like) gulping down my water. I heard it of course, but I did not wake up. I was dreaming at the time—I know I was because of the astronaut pantomiming in the corner of the room; a weird but recurring member of my dreamworld cast—and I turned my head when I heard her gulping the water like a lost man in the desert.
There she was, as large as me, sitting on her hind legs and gripping one of the glasses of water in her front paws so tightly that her claws screeched against the glass as it slid with the movement of her jaws in a rhythmic and ear-shivering Scree. Scree. Scree.
"Miss Daisy!" I scolded, and she glanced over at me. She smiled, but did not stop until the glass was empty. A cold annoyance settled in my gut. That was my water. And I was thirsty.
Miss Daisy set the glass aside delicately with her new, furry, opposable thumbs. I shivered at the sight. "Miss Daisy, that was my water!"
"Mrr?" Miss Daisy said. "No, dear," she purred in a low, smoky voice. "I believe it is mine." And she picked up a second glass with her separating and elongating furry fingers. "I would offer you some, of course, but that would quite work against the process."
"What process?" I asked nervously (though not too nervously—the astronaut was still pantomiming in the corner. I could get out of this).
"See for yourself," and she nodded towards my own hands as she buried her nose in the second glass.
I glanced down at my hands and cried out in shock. A thin, fuzzy layer of white hair had covered my hands and was creeping up my arm. It tickled unpleasantly and my throat felt even drier.
"Unseemly, isn't it?" Miss Daisy asked. "It is ever so difficult to keep clean. Honestly, we would have done this so much sooner if half my time hadn't been spent bathing…"
"W-what?" I asked, running my sharpening nails through my hair to see if it really was becoming shorter, like it felt. It was. I gulped with difficulty, since one generally needs moisture to gulp. I pinched myself to wake up.
Miss Daisy stretched out her oddly-straight back legs with a relieved sigh. I blinked my eyes and did a double-take, having only just noticed that the white on her was no longer fur, but an elegant, shimmy white cocktail dress with thigh-high slits that let her beautiful bare legs extend out as cat-like and sensual as I had ever seen. "You must remember, dear," Miss Daisy said, "that it's the water you need."
"Huh?" I shook my head to clear it and pinched myself again, harder. I winced in pain.
"The water, dear. Do listen up." She set down the empty second glass and reached for a third. "You'll go on and find yourself a nice person to take you in—someone pretty, if you can manage—and bond with them. Bonding is key. But also: make sure there's water available. It's very important."
"Why?" I asked through cracking lips. My heart thudded hard in my chest, but that was not unusual of nightmares. I really needed to wake up.
"Why?" Miss Daisy laughed between gulps, her now-long, dark hair shimmying like a curtain with each movement. "Because without water there is no process! There is no transformation, no movement from one state to the next. Without water, there is only shriveled stagnation." She snorted through an alarmingly-human nose, and shook her head, "Why must there be water?"
I suddenly looked at the one remaining glass on the table in front of Miss Daisy. I leapt for it, swiping out with a huge and clumsy paw, but with practiced reflexes Miss Daisy batted me away, hissing angrily through still-feline teeth. I fell to the ground on all fours and found with a chilling terror that it felt more comfortable than standing on two legs.
I hissed back at her, perhaps more effectively with my cracking throat than she, but her arched position over the glasses of water made her look far larger and more menacing, and I backed away instinctively.
"Good kitty," she smiled, picking up the final glass. "Run along, now."
I did not run. I watched her teeth shrink into human teeth with each gulp, her pupils pull back into circles, and the eye color change into the same unusual grey that mine were. When she finished that final glass and looked at me, I yowled in despair.
She was me.
She threw the glass at me and then I ran.
I woke up sometime later in the cold streets of my city neighborhood, but I was not cold. My fur was nice and thick, and I felt warm. I stood up, stretched, and trotted off in the dark, noticing the tiny insects that scooted out of my way in the shadowy corners. I feasted on mouse that night, but I have since become wiser.
If I want someone to take me in, I must look underfed, pathetic. I must let the shine grow out of my coat and my fur become patchy so that when I turn up on the doorstep of my chosen home, my shivering and desperation will be real.
I will choose someone pretty, and if I can, someone rich. Someone I can bond with. But mostly, of this I must make sure, I will choose someone who always falls asleep with a glass of water beside their bed.