Delectably Devious Tales Contest Entry- 13th bday

Peanut the cat watched a full moon rise in the sky from the top of his human’s stairs.  Above his head hung her favorite horseshoe.  He found it highly amusing that she believed it would bring her luck.  But that was only because she had won a poster of a velociraptor at a fair that she had really wanted about 6 months ago.  Why she had wanted it so badly, he couldn’t fathom.  After all, the other neighborhood cats always talked about how their human girls always angsted over boys and blathered on about makeup and how much they hated those strange red spots on their face that they called acne that appeared during puberty.  And yet his Nelly went after a velociraptor poster.  Peanut knew of no other girls who had those kinds of posters.  And the strange thing was, was that Nelly had only become more tomboyish as she grew older.  She had taken to singing the GI Joe theme song a capella in her room as loudly as she could while the other girls her age went from playing with dolls to giving each other fashion makeovers.  Finishing his musings, Peanut bounded down the stairs and into the kitchen where Nelly’s parents sat, sipping their once-weekly cocktails.  He supposed that this was like social grooming for them: a time to share news with each other.  It certainly couldn’t be the cocktail itself that they enjoyed- the mere smell of it overwhelmed Peanut and made his head spin.  No, it must be the spending time together that they looked forward to.  Nelly’s father started speaking as Peanut watched them.  “I think I know what has been bothering me, dear.  I was talking to George today and he told me about a name they have for this fear that I can’t seem to get rid of.”  “What is it?” his wife asked.  “He said it was,” he pronounced it slowly, “trisk-a-deck-a-pho-bia.  He said it means the fear of Friday the 13th.”  “Well that’s certainly an interesting name for it,” she responded.  Peanut couldn’t believe his ears.  There was a fear of a day and date being associated?  Wasn’t that just coincidence, the natural order of things?  He shook his head.  ‘Foolish humans,’ he thought.  And he walked off to see if there was another cats’ meeting tonight, a place where things actually made sense and coincidences weren’t feared.

Words: 399