Mushy is a pretty normal guy, he always likes to think. He eats three meals a day, never snacks, and gets seven and a half hours of sleep every night. He is a man of routine. On weekdays, he works his nine-to-five, and on weekends, he sleeps in an extra hour before heading to his favorite diner. He isn’t married, no, and he certainly doesn’t date.
Mushy lives alone in a small red-brick house that is pretty from the outside, but terribly boring from the inside. Mushy has no eye for interior design, and it shows. Mushy had decorated his home exclusively with Ikea furniture. The walls of his home stand in particular neglect — the only piece hangs slightly askew, with no frame, just the subject: a glasses-wearing monkey with a Supreme sweater.
In fact, his name, “Mushy”, might be the most interesting thing about him.
One weekend morning in the middle of January, Mushy wakes up with a start. He sees snow. It’s snowing, a highly abnormal occurrence in the Southeast. But Mushy doesn’t live in the Southeast — Mushy lives in a small town in the Northeast, so snow doesn’t particularly startle him. A dream had startled Mushy, and this dream continues to eat away at him as he sits upright in bed, beads of sweat trickling down his brow. The dream ate at his very core, the essence of him: His normality.
In his dream, Mushy was a landlord in a busy city. He couldn’t tell where. It wasn’t snowing in the dream, so maybe it was the Southeast. Mushy was in charge of a lot of tenants, most of whom had no contact with Mushy. He liked it better this way. The dream started with an e-mail.
Dear Mushy, I am currently a tenant in 103 E Pacific Street #3L. Recently we’ve been having problems with our water heater. It makes a sort of hissing sound whenever I try to turn hot water on, and then no hot water comes out. The water is actually ice cold. Could you check this out for us?
Best, Maddie
Mushy groaned. There was one thing he hated more than grease staining the floor: It was tenants who had problems with their apartments. He morosely put on a coat and headed over to the Pacific Street apartment, which he owned in full.
When he got there, a woman — he presumed Maddie — was wearing a coat. It was extremely cold in the apartment, so it made sense to him that she was wearing a coat.
“Hi, are you Maddie?”
“Yes, and you are Mushy?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“So we’ve been having this trouble with the water heater.”
“You’re not the first person to be having trouble with the water heater.”
“Really? Other people in this building?”
“No, actually one person from every building I own.”
“Huh, that’s pretty strange. We’ve also been having this weird problem with the heating.”
“I noticed that you were wearing a coat.”
“Yes, that’s because it’s so cold in here without the heater working, and I can’t even warm up with a nice cup of tea.”
“That’s a real shame. Let me see what I can do about the water heater.”
Mushy walked into the closet which housed the water heater. He yelled “Maddie, could you turn on the hot water?” and a few seconds later, he heard a sink turn on, and a cat jumped out, clawing him. “Ouch!” he exclaimed, and ran out of the closet back into the living room, where Maddie was sitting.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, just burned my hand a little bit,” he lied.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that hissing sound was hot.”
“Don’t worry, I should have seen it coming. I’ve seen this problem a lot.”
Mushy knew that he was in trouble. In every case of this issue, there was a cat living in the boiler room, biting through pipes and hissing whenever the water turned on. He wasn’t sure why he lied each time. The first time, it sort of slipped out. Mushy never lied. After the first time, he knew he had to continue. It couldn’t get out the Mushy’s empire of real estate was actually ruled by felines.
He thought he knew when it started. Two months ago, he leased an apartment, 3587 Western Ave #2G, to a large tabby. It did seem strange to him at the time. He had never leased an apartment to a cat before, and this one was especially domineering. The cat had asked him to sign the lease. Normally the tenant signed the lease, so Mushy thought this was a little strange, but still played along, thinking the cat was just a little off.
Two weeks later he got the first water-heater complaint, and the rest was history.
Mushy realized what he had to do. He called up the tabby.
“Hello? Anyone there?” “Hello. This is Cat.” “We need to talk.” “Okay. Meet me in my apartment. You know where I live.” “That’s right. I know where you live.”
Mushy went to the Western Ave apartment. He opened the door to apartment 2G. The apartment was covered with hair. The cat sat on an Ikea couch, larger than life. “That cat is fucking huge,” thought Mushy. And it was. The cat, sitting, was at least six feet tall.
“You need to call your cats off,” demanded Mushy.
“I can’t tell them to leave their homes,” retorted Cat.
“Those aren’t their homes.”
“Yes they are. You signed the lease.”
“What? No, that was your lease. I drafted it myself.”
“Are you sure of what you signed?”
“No, I didn’t check that it was the same paper,” Mushy said with dread.
“That’s right. While you weren’t looking, I switched out the contracts with something that I wrote.”
“So you are the landlord now?”
“That’s right. I am the landlord. There’s also a loophole in all the contracts that you wrote for your tenants that allows a single landlord-owned pet in each property.”
“Fuck, that’s brilliant. So all the cats are there legally.”
“Correct.”
“Cat, you’ve bested me.”
“I know I have.”
“Still, your cats are intruding on the happiness of my tenants. Is there any way you could consolidate your cats into fewer apartments?”
“I’ll need some compromises from you.”
“Like what?”
“When you die, we will eat you.”
Mushy was silent. He thought for a moment. No one would come to his funeral anyway. He nodded quietly and left the apartment. Cat had bested him, and proven itself to be the supreme landlord. He awaited his fate, to be digested by a bunch of cats. That’s when Mushy woke up.
Mushy moves to the kitchen. He can’t go to his diner today because it’s snowing too much. He gazes out the window into the lightly falling snow, and sees a tabby cat sitting on an Ikea outdoor couch. The cat is freezing. He opens the door and lets it inside. Then the cat grows to 6 feet tall, and slashes its claws at Mushy.
Cat says, “That wasn’t a dream.” A few days later, Mushy will be deposited into litter boxes around the city.