The Empty Glass in My Hand (short story)

 

The Empty Glass in My Hand

First published as 'The Empty Glass' in A Coup of Owls Spring 2026 15/03/26

 I find myself standing in the dark at the window, staring down at the lonely city streets, with no memory of who I am. My head pounds in agony. Every muscle in my body aches. My bones throb. Even the orange glow of the sodium streetlights stings my eyes.

There is a glass in my hand. It’s empty. Yet I’m assailed by the stench of alcohol and cigarettes that permeates me.

It’s not hyperbole to repeat that I don’t know who I am. I don’t. My name escapes me through a fogginess that seems to cloud my vision; I can’t make out my face in the glass. I’m a ghost haunting the city, haunting myself. Or perhaps I’m too hungover, too drunk, too tired, and perhaps the streetlights are too bright to make out any clear image in the window’s vague reflection.

I am alone.

There’s no one outside, just the quiet, dead streets. Rundown cars and potholes. Dirty pavements and piled-up trash. Inside, I can hear the drip of a tap over the guttural growl of my wheezing lungs. It’s painful to breathe, but I continue.

I turn around and see an apartment just as destitute and decrepit as the city I saw through the window. There’s a sofa which has seen better days. Laundry heaped on a chair. A television with a cracked screen. A lopsided lamp. There’s an unmade bed, barely a bed, against the wall. I move closer, the floorboards protest my unsteady gait, and I notice stains on the mattress, visible even in the gloom. The pathetic blemishes aren’t dark enough to be blood or shit, but from their position, I can tell which bodily fluids begat them.

I feel sick.

I realise I’m still holding the empty glass, and I set it down on the coffee table in the centre of the room. It fits in amongst the partially eaten Chinese takeaways, the overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles that metastasise on its surface. The table stinks of mould, another virulent reek attacking my senses.

I follow my deformed shadow to the bathroom and stagger through its open doorway. I’m dizzy, and I use the wall for support. I approach the mirror over the fractured ceramic sink, eager to see if I recognise my reflection. I am disappointed. A stranger looks back at me with bloodshot and tired eyes, his features dimly lit by the amber light coming in from the street. His face is old and gaunt, with deep, shadowy crags carving his features. His hairline is receding, greying. The man is ugly. Worn out. He wears his life on his face.

I vomit repeatedly, painfully, into what’s left of the sink. Acid burns my throat. The puke is brown and watery, it reeks of booze, and it drips through the cracks in the porcelain and onto my shoes, onto the grimy floor. I find it hard to care. My head is spinning. I still hurt. My diaphragm trembles.

I lift my head and stare at the stranger again.

I don’t know who I am.

I wonder if the stranger I see in my reflection is really worth knowing or if my amnesia is a mercy.

Something catches my eye in the mirror, beyond the stranger’s head, a glint, and my eyes are drawn to the bathtub behind me. It’s full, almost overflowing. The tap drips, causes ripples in the water. It shimmers. I cry out when I realise what’s sitting in the tub, as I see the undulations distort around it, and I fall to the floor in shock.

There’s a body in the bath.

It takes me a few moments before I stand back up, before I can get my panicked breaths under control. My heart thunders, and I can’t stop it.

It takes me more moments before I dare to peer into the bath again.

There is definitely a body. A corpse. A man. The water is almost black – blood, I think, it has to be blood – but the true colour of the liquid eludes me in the faint orange light. I don’t want to look at his face, but I do. He’s another stranger. His expression pained. Pale. Distraught. A frozen death mask with rolled-back eyes and a distorted grimace. It disgusts me. He disgusts me. There’s an empty glass on the side of the bath, an angry knife, lithe as a predator, sharp and serrated, lies sated next to it. A drained whiskey bottle watches over the scene.

I wonder if I killed this man.

I don’t know who he is any more than I know who I am.

Does it even matter?

I stumble a little closer, realising there’s puke on my hand from where I fell on the floor. I wipe it on my shirt and notice the fabric is already wet, but my thoughts are more concerned with what’s in front of me than the state of my clothes. I can’t stop myself from staring at the stranger in the bath. He haunts me in the shadows of the dark bathroom, the amber streetlight barely reaching in from outside, only a light caress on his vile face. The dead man’s eyes look eternally inward, but mine are fixed on his body. He’s fully dressed, drenched with the dark concoction.

I stop right next to the tub.

Part of me wants to join him in the water.

I resist.

I hear someone hammering on the front door of the apartment. Shouting. Clamouring. Trying to get in.

I ignore them. The body in the bath is hypnotic, mesmerising. My attention is clenched in its allure.

I can’t look away.

This place is cold now. Maybe it was always cold. There’s vapour on my breath. Goosebumps on my skin. I shiver. The bathtub stinks of metal and rot.

I don’t know who I am.

The body is gone, and the water is clear. I’m holding a glass in my hand. It’s full. Whiskey.

The person outside is screaming now, thumping and banging, desperate.

It’s too late.

My head pounds in agony. Every muscle in my body aches. My bones throb. It’s painful to breathe. To live.

I step into the bath.

Don't Feed the Strays (short story)

 Don’t Feed the Strays

First published in Troublemaker Firestarter Volume 10 Fairweather 18/01/26

 

                Big yellow eyes stared at me from the end of the garden, from within the gloom of the bougainvillea.  Or was it the hydrangea?  I didn’t know; John had planted them, and he loved those plants more than me.  What I did know was that the eyes were bigger than they should be, I think, or was that just my tiredness playing tricks?

“Don’t feed the strays.”

                That’s what John had told me when he left at the crack of dawn.  Before he set off to abandon me for a week.  He said it was work.  Ha.  He was probably fucking some rotted twink in a sleazy hotel.

                “If you feed them again George, they’ll just keep coming back,” he said.  “They’ll mess up my plants.”

                I didn’t care about his plants.

                Did he speak like this to that floozie of his too?

I waited at the window, staring into the dark of the back garden.  Trying not to think about John and his whore.  The stray cats never came in the day, and I spent the morning pacing, this afternoon arguing with her from number six about leaving her bins out, and then this evening I pigged out on snacks and stared out of the back window almost non-stop.  I sat in the dark, my lights switched off.  Waiting.  Watching.  I didn’t have anything else in my life.  Not with John abandoning me.

The yellow eyes had come to keep me company.

                Just one cat tonight; there were usually more.

                I slipped from my perch, grabbed the pack of ham I kept at the ready, and slithered to the back door as soundlessly as I could; I didn’t want to scare away a new friend.  I eased open the door, not trusting the oil I’d applied to the hinges a couple of hours ago.  A cold evening breeze tickled the bare skin on my arms.

                I blinked against the dark gloom.  The night wasn’t as quiet as it should have been; amongst the windy whispers of the bushes, the distant traffic of the motorway, and the wheeze of my asthmatic lungs, interrupted the blare of late-night gameshows from the open windows of her from number six.

                “Sandra,” I shouted, “turn that bloody shit down!”

                Damn it, what had I done?  The yellow eyes had gone.

                I ignored the “fuck off” I heard in response to my exclamation, dropped some ham on the patio just in case the stray returned, and headed back inside.

 #

                I was woken the next morning by a phone call from John.  I didn’t tell him about the stray.  I didn’t ask him about his rotted twink.  I complained about her from number six; he complained about work, though I didn’t believe him.  I knew what he was doing, who he was doing, and it wasn’t work that took his attention from me.  This was all our relationship had become.

                “Don’t feed the strays,” he reminded me again.  And I thought that was exactly what he was doing with the guys he was cheating on me with, feeding his strays.  I hated him, I think.

                The ham had gone when I checked, but anything could’ve taken it.  I forced myself to believe it was the stray cat from last night, though maybe it’d been her from number six; I wouldn’t put it past her to scavenge meat from the floor.

                I returned to bed after that, slept the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, making up for the lateness last night and the lateness to come.

                I returned to my position at the window that evening, sitting and snacking in the dark once more, staring out into my dingy back garden, scouring the bushes for any glint of a yellow eye, any shadow in the gloom.

                It was almost 3am when I caught sight of something moving at the end of the garden.  A dark shape slinking along the grass.  Large.  Maybe.  It was hard to tell its size in the pitch night.

                I was sure it was my stray cat.

                I hurried to the door with the ham and slipped out into the cold evening.

                “Pss, pss, pss,” I whispered.  I tiptoed along the patio and onto the grass.  The shadow had moved into the deep shade of the hydrangea/bougainvillea.  It was there.  I knew it was there.  “Pss, pss, pss.”  I tried to make my eyes adjust to the darkness, to see it.  To see the cat.  I could only see shadows.  “Pss, pss, pss.”  I waved the slimy slice like a maiden’s handkerchief and crouched lower.  I still couldn’t see it.  There was just a… shape.  “Pss, pss, pss.”  I threw the ham into the bushes, and it fell through the leaves and flowers as if there was nothing hiding beneath them.  No concealed cat.  But it had to be there.  Had to be.

                “Pss, pss, pss,” I repeated, louder this time, and threw another piece of ham into the flora.  “Pss, pss, pss.”

                The cat was silent, but a cranky human voice replied instead.  “Piss off George!”  Her from number six.  She screamed at me from her window.

                I returned a volley of insults and swears, some I’m not proud of, some I’m very proud of, but it was no less than she deserved.  She gave as much as she got.

                I chucked the rest of the ham into the bushes and headed to bed.

 #

                John woke me again the next morning.  Early.  He called to break up with me, to tell me it was over.  That things weren’t working out between us.  I’d known they weren’t.  We both knew.  I told him I loved him, and he said nothing back.  John told me we’d talk more when he came back from his work trip.  Work.  Ha!  Sort out the divorce.  I didn’t mention his rotted twink.  I didn’t mention the stray.  I didn’t even mention her from number six.

                I hung up on him.

                I cried myself back into a restless and broken nightmare-ridden sleep.

                When I woke again, when I dragged myself out of bed, eyes red and swollen, it was already evening.  I couldn’t cry anymore.

                I slinked out to the shop, bought more ham for the stray cat, along with a bottle of wine for myself.  Two bottles.  It was already dark by the time I reached my street.

                Her from number six had her television turned up again, louder than usual, and I banged and screamed on her door for five minutes telling her to show some respect, but she ignored me.  I think.  I couldn’t hear anything inside over her idiotic gameshows, and she had good reason not to reply.  I was enraged.  Furious.  I hated her, I think.

                I hurried home, embarrassed at my outburst.

                As I returned to my kitchen to spy for strays, I realised something wasn’t right.  There was a coppery smell in the air.  Metallic.  Fresh.  Shivers ran up my arms like static.  I placed my shopping on the counter and sought the source, checking the cooker and fridge, the lights, making sure… I don’t know… making sure the electrics hadn’t blown, but no, they were all working.

                The smell was strongest by the back door.

                I didn’t look out the window, though I probably should have; I swung open the door and let the cold and dark night rush inside.

                And there on the patio was a gift.

                A mauled and bloodied gift.

                I knew about cats.  I often fed the strays, much to John’s displeasure.  Not that he mattered now.  But something I knew about cats, something I guess most people understand, is that sometimes cats like to bring presents, as if they know you’ve forgotten the prehistoric hunt of your ancestors, as if you’re a useless giant kitten who can’t feed themselves.  Or was the real reason that the cat understands tit for tat.  You feed them and they feed you.  No.  This felt like more than that, like the stray cat had stalked the neurons of my brain, pounced on my anger and fury and seen me.

                There, sprawled on my patio, laid out on display either for my banquet or for my revenge, was her from number six.  Dead.  Cleary dead.  Her belly had been slashed open.  Her viscera exposed, partially eaten.  There were two big, bloodied punctures on her neck.  A deadly bite.

                It was no ordinary stray cat that’d done this.

                I couldn’t stop staring at her.  I felt sick.

                A deep and short growl broke my focus from the corpse, and I looked up.  Me and her weren’t alone.  Sat at the end of the garden near the bougainvillea or hydrangea, nonchalant but arrogant like all cats, was the stray.  It was huge, a big black cat, taller than me, built of shadowy sinews and muscle.  A massive bulky shape in the dark.  It was almost invisible against the night, but its size was clear, its presence obvious.  I knew it could kill me with one swipe.  I could see its fangs, its curious neon eyes.  It was watching me.

                “Don’t feed the strays,” that’s what John had told me.  He’d broken up with me for that rotted twink, abandoned me from afar.  Left me alone.

                “Don’t feed the strays.”

                He wanted me to be lonely.

                It was almost funny.

                I looked back down at her from number six, at her corpse, and then stared back into those yellow orbs by the bushes, and I knew why the big cat was here.  I knew.  I knew why it’d picked me.  Why it had appeased with this gory gift at my feet.

                “Don’t feed the strays.”

                I knew why.

                I knew.

The End.