(miniflash story)

Maya had always been skeptical of ghost stories until she inherited her great-aunt’s house. The Victorian monstrosity had been empty for fifteen years, its paint peeling like old skin and its windows staring blindly at the overgrown garden. But it wasn’t the creaking floorboards or the doors that opened by themselves that convinced her something supernatural was happening—it was the cat food.

Every morning, Maya would find the small ceramic bowl she’d placed by the kitchen window completely empty, licked clean as if by the most fastidious feline tongue. She’d started leaving it out as a joke, remembering her great-aunt’s stories about Midnight, the black cat who had supposedly died in the house decades ago. Now she wasn’t laughing.

“This is ridiculous,” Maya muttered, refilling the bowl for the seventh time that week. “I’m feeding a ghost cat. My therapist is going to have a field day with this.”

But as she set the bowl down, she felt it—a gentle pressure against her ankle, warm and purring, exactly like a cat rubbing against her leg. She looked down to see nothing but dust motes dancing in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the grimy window.

The haunting, if that’s what it was, had a peculiar schedule. Every day at 3:17 PM, Maya would hear the distinctive sound of claws on hardwood, padding across the living room floor. She’d follow the sound, only to find perfectly arranged scratch marks on her great-aunt’s antique furniture, as if an invisible cat had been sharpening its claws with supernatural precision. At night, things got more interesting. Maya would lie in bed, listening to the unmistakable sound of a cat purring somewhere in the darkness. It wasn’t threatening—quite the opposite.

The purring was deeply comforting, like a lullaby made of contentment. Sometimes she’d feel a slight depression in the mattress beside her, as if a cat had jumped up to sleep at her feet. “Midnight?” she whispered one evening, feeling foolish but oddly hopeful. “Is that you?” The purring stopped abruptly, replaced by what sounded distinctly like a meow of acknowledgment. Maya’s heart skipped a beat. She reached out tentatively into the darkness and felt something extraordinary—soft, ethereal fur that seemed to exist somewhere between reality and dream. For just a moment, she could swear she felt whiskers tickling her palm.

The next morning brought the strangest development yet. Maya woke to find tiny, translucent paw prints leading from the kitchen to every room in the house, as if the ghost cat had been giving her a tour while she slept. The prints shimmered like moonlight on water and disappeared when she tried to touch them. But it was in the attic that Maya made the discovery that changed everything. Following a particularly insistent series of phantom meows, she climbed the narrow stairs to find a small, heart-shaped locket lying open on a dusty trunk. Inside was a miniature photograph of a stunning black cat with the most intelligent green eyes she’d ever seen, and beneath it, in her great-aunt’s spidery handwriting: “Midnight – My dearest companion, 1987-2003. Wait for me.”

Maya felt tears pricking her eyes. The cat hadn’t been haunting the house—he’d been guarding it, waiting faithfully for a family member to return. She carefully closed the locket and slipped it into her pocket.

That evening, she sat in the living room with Midnight’s empty food bowl in her lap. “I understand now,” she said softly to the seemingly empty room. “You’ve been taking care of this place, haven’t you? Keeping it safe until someone came home.”

The response was immediate and overwhelming — a purring so loud and joyful it seemed to emanate from the very walls of the house. Maya felt invisible paws on her shoulders, a ghostly head butting against her chin with obvious affection. For the first time since arriving, the house felt truly alive, filled with love that transcended the boundary between life and death.

From that night forward, Maya never felt alone in the house. Midnight had found his purpose again, and she had found the most devoted roommate imaginable.