She Came Back as a Cat

I'm the cautionary tale they teach in PR seminars now.

Booked my first speaking role at nineteen. Got dropped at twenty-four. Died on the floor of a studio apartment off Western Ave with a half-empty pill bottle and a phone that wouldn't stop buzzing.

I open my eyes and I'm a cat.

My new owner is the man who let Lumen Talent Group bury me on his mother's signature and stayed quiet while the internet skinned me alive. Asher Kane. Lumen's golden boy. The COO whose silence was the only verdict that mattered.

He lifts me out of a Petco cardboard carrier and holds me against his chest. His voice has gone hoarse in a way I've never heard it.

*Hey. I'm going to call you Birdie.*

Birdie.

That was my mother's word for me. She died of an OD when I was four. Nobody in this city knows that word.

He doesn't know.

The kitten he's holding against his sternum is the dead girl whose final text he never opened.

I rake my claws down his jaw.

He doesn't flinch. He carries me past the foyer, past the staff, up the stairs, into a study on the second floor of a house on Mulholland that I have seen exactly once in my life, and I see the wall.

It is covered in me.

Glossy 8x10s. Press shots. Stills from the indie. Stills from the audition tape that was supposed to be my second act. A whole grid of a dead woman.

I jump down. I creep close enough to read.

Every photograph has the same sentence written on its back in black marker.

*She didn't kill herself.*