Nine Lives

Prologue

Cat Camera

The bathroom is blush pink. Everything in the room the color of your face when you’re falling in love: the cut marble, the basin, the tub, the ceiling. All soft, fleshy, like flushed skin, lips, areolae. The towels, too, fresh, fluffy, hotel-soft.

The scene looks like something from a glossy magazine, or a double-page spread in a matte-finished coffee table book. Everything about it desirable, curated, atelier-sourced.

Hanging over the edge of the tub is a human hand. A female hand, Caucasian.

Her nails are manicured, polished, understated, though the skin of the hand is notably too pale, almost bluing.

Zoom in and a slow pulse can be seen tap-tap-tapping on the flesh of the raised wrist.

She is still alive.

The camera jerks and suddenly we are up on the sink, looking down at her. She is almost submerged in the water, save for her head, which is cocked at an angle, leaving her mouth and nose just above the surface. She is in her underwear.

Her eyes are open, wide open. Though there is seemingly no other movement from her, every so often she blinks. She is conscious.

Beneath her delicate skin, her veins are visible tangles of blue and green rope. The water must be cold. So cold.

Her auburn hair is suspended in smooth tendrils just beneath the surface. She looks like a mermaid. She looks beatific. Well, almost.

Her gaze is forced up to the left, as if she is looking up at her own unmoving hand against the tub’s rim.

Her breath ripples on the water’s surface, in-out-in-out, in-out-in-out. This and the rise and fall of her chest are the only movements visible.

The camera swings up to the window high above us. That must be how the cat got in, how the camera hanging from his neck is filming this now, the iris of the pet camera taking everything in.

The live stream is showing us this in real time. The woman needs help, soon, or she is going to die.

The woman is me.