Tira-Meow-Su

The librarian used to wonder why no one wanted the position that doubled her salary and included lodging in the loft above.

The position had been vacant for nearly a year, with only temps coming in but quickly quitting. As a recent grad, she was ecstatic that she was hired on, would have her expenses paid to move into the small cozy town, AND didn’t have to work a second job to get by.

But now, on her first day, she was starting to suspect why no one stayed.

Her pens rolled off the desk… even when she thought she put them in the holder. She found neatly organized stack of papers strewn across the floor when she returning books to their shelves. Plus she didn’t remember eating THAT much of her pizza after coming back from taking a call.

And she would have sworn she felt watched whenever she had to use the restroom.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone here, but unfortunately, in this economy and with her mountainous student loans, she wasn’t about to let the heebie jeebies make her homeless. So she did what most millennials would do: she sucked it up.

After weeks of dealing with things moving or going missing, and the occasional weight of a sleep paralysis weight on her chest at night, she was fed up.

On one particular dark and stormy evening, she was enjoying a nice glass of bottom shelf wine and some doom scrolling. In time with the boom of thunder, her glass moved across the table.

She lunged at it and put it back into the center, shouting out, “Can you stop being such a menace!?!”

Silence.

She leaned back into the sofa, pretending to scroll while watching the glass from her periphery.

It moved an inch but she didn’t react.

Another inch.

And another, this time lightning cracked the sky and she saw IT. It slowly fizzled into view and the longer she stared the more solid it became.

A dark, but transparent void, it was about the size of a house cat… no wait, it WAS a house cat!

“What are you doing?” She asked, staring right at it.

Startled, the cat froze, front paw mid-shenanigan. It glanced up staring with its derpy eyes at something behind the librarian. Not a thought firing through its head.

She leaned forward and squinted at the ghostly pumpkin name tag that read: Menace.

“Purr-fectly suited,” she concurred with a wink and nod towards the feline.

Menace simply meowed and leapt on the sofa, wasting no time to take a cat nap on his new librarian’s lap.