If Jinsoul had to spend any longer chasing this damn animal she was going to throw the wretched thing into the nearest river. It was a wonderful day in the suburbs, the kind that puts a smile on your face as soon as you wake up. It was the kind of winter day meant for huddling under a pile of blankets and watching movies, but instead of being warmly snuggled in bed with Netflix on, Jinsoul found herself engaging in physical exercise (the horror!) in the living room, wallowing in horrible anguish.

    The cause of her misery: her mother’s evil, satanic demon cat, now perched on top of one of the living room bookshelves. Save an errant clump of fur, the thing looked just as unperturbed as when it dragged Jinsoul into the hunt a solid thirty five minutes ago. Jinsoul, on the other hand, looked like absolute hell. Her blond hair stuck determinedly in clumps out of her ponytail, and she was quite certain that she looked like a madwoman thanks to the cat scratches on her collarbone (even she didn’t know how they got there). I’m too old for this, she thought, thinking more fondly now of her annoying roommate Sooyoung and their messy dorm room back at University. Needless to say, this was not how she wanted to spend her Christmas break.

    “Mom! Make someone else catch the damn cat!” Her mom’s head stuck out a couple inches from the doorway of the kitchen, her expression about as beleaguered as one can expect when dealing with such blazing incompetence from her oldest and purportedly brightest child. 

    “Five minutes, Jinsoul! If Nari doesn’t make it to the vet on time, I will disown you, don’t think I’m kidding!” she said. Jinsoul groaned and flopped onto the carpet. Nari leered at her from her perch above. 

    “You wanna fight?” Jinsoul mumbled. The cat kept staring at her in a clear challenge. Jinsoul cocked an eyebrow menacingly. The cat deemed her to be not a threat and busied itself with grooming, nonchalantly at its paw like it was mocking her. 

    “Yah, look at me!” she whined. Receiving no response, she decided that she needed to take drastic action. Summoning the last vestiges of her strength, she lunged at the cat and screamed at the top of her lungs.

    “Ahhhhhhh!!!” Thunk. “Ow!” Jinsoul found herself sprawled on the floor after a painful collision with a bookshelf, having flat out missed the cat. This time she watched it dart away from her, claws skittering across the tiles of the kitchen floor in a manic explosion of surprise. Across her field of vision Nari darted out from the kitchen… then through the hallway… to the door…

In slow motion Jinsoul, panicking, watched the cat leap through the doorway to freedom, the door left open to cool the kitchen down while her mother baked.

    “Jinsoul!” the same mother now roared. ‘Tell me that wasn’t the cat!” Jinsoul dragged herself off the floor and sprinted out the door, her frustration discarded for panic.

    “That wasn’t the cat!” she called over her shoulder, already halfway down the driveway and frantically looking down the street. She tripped over her own feet, nearly face-planting on the lawn, and continued to run after the soulless beast. The thought faintly registered in her head that it was the middle of December and she wasn’t wearing a coat, but Jinsoul was running on fumes of desperation and a twenty year old college student’s special form of insanity. Losing ground by the second, she pumped her legs with new enthusiasm until the cat disappeared around the corner onto a neighboring street.

    “Damn it!”

    It was a beautiful day, even in winter; the sun shone brightly on the snow banks by the side of the road, painting the whole neighborhood in glaring white light. The trees shivered without their coats of leaves, adorned only in pretty patterns of frost which spiraled unrestrained across every available surface. The few clouds present drifted lazily across the blue sky like rafts on an uninspired river, the perfect picture of winter slowness on a weekend morning.

    Under this tranquil sky, Jinsoul growled in frustration, slipped on a patch of ice, and banged her foot on a parked car, its alarm wailing with fervor. Cursing under her breath, Jinsoul looked around wildly, spotting no movement save the scurrying of some idiot squirrel who didn’t know it was freezing out. “Jung Jinsoul, get it together,” she muttered, setting off in a random direction down the street. Jinsoul did not want to die today. While she was away at college, her little sister Yerim burned half of Jinsoul’s old pokemon cards in some sort of satanic ritual (Jinsoul blames Yerim’s tiny evil mastermind of a best friend, Yeojin). When she found out the day before, Yerim ran like a coward and locked herself in the safety of her room, so Jinsoul hadn’t had the chance to beat the little twerp up yet.

Jinsoul’s agenda for the rest of her winter break:

Find the stupid cat.

Make Yerim pay. 

Sleep thirteen hours a day.

Oh, and start worrying about the physics class that would start when she got back to school. Jinsoul had heard her new professor was a scumbag, the kind of teacher who preys on unprepared kids on the first day and doesn’t know the meaning of the word vacation. Apparently her mom didn’t know the word, either, because it had only been thirty seconds tops but Jinsoul was starting to freeze out here and she wasn’t sure if her mom would even let her come back empty handed. But how does one find a cat?

    Eureka! Jinsoul crouched, wildly scanning the sidewalk until she found what she was looking for. You’ve lost now, cat, she said, her brow furrowing in determination. Jinsoul spared half a second for a triumphant hop before she set off on another run, following the distinct line of paw prints leading down the road. The streets of Jinsoul’s childhood flashed by, reminding her of previous winters spent throwing snowballs and building ugly snowmen. Some of the houses were already decked out in Christmas lights, though she couldn’t stop to look at them much because her eyes were trained on the trail running next to her feet. Jinsoul reigned back her sprint into an unstable jog, wheezing a bit in the dry December air. She hadn’t run this hard since she joined the track team in Freshman year. Needless to say, that was not the wisest decision of her high school years. 

    Pumping her arms, Jinsoul skidded around the corner when the paw prints abruptly to Old Elm Circle. She was pretty far from home now, at least six streets over if the map in her head was correct. According to her watch, she had a minute and a half left before her mom’s five minutes would elapse. She wasn’t going to make the deadline, but if she could nab the animal in the next few minutes she might still be saved. Any longer outside and the cat would be fine—her mom let the animal wander around during the day, although it always came back for dinner—but Jinsoul might start to cry. Her thin NASA T-Shirt and white hoodie, ideal for lounging inside with a cup of hot chocolate, were failing miserably to protect against the biting wind, and her slippers (because of course she wasn’t wearing running shoes around the house) did nothing to protect her sock-clad toes from getting wet. She didn’t despair, though, because the paw prints had become less spaced out, like the cat had finally gotten tired and decided to stop rocketing across the neighborhood.             

    Jinsoul had to give it credit, the monster was smart. Had to give her credit, Jinsoul reminded herself, because her mom always got annoyed when she didn’t act like the cat was a person. Nari had been enlisted as a Jinsoul replacement the previous year during her first semester of college. With the oldest daughter out of the house—Yerim was still there, but she was a reclusive teenager—her mom got lonely and took in what Jinsoul was pretty sure was a stray her dad found one day on the street. Now, Jinsoul cursed the unfairness, remembering how she couldn’t even have a pet fish when she was little. She wanted a pretty blue one. She was going to name it Steve. Alas, she miscalculated and made the request when her parents were freshly mad at her for pushing Yerim down the stairs in a cardboard box. She just wanted to know what would happen! For science! Nevertheless, she didn’t get the fish.

    As Jinsoul moved further from home, the houses began to look less and less familiar. The streets closest to her house she remembered frequenting daily, but she rarely ventured out to Old Elm Circle as a child, as it was in the opposite direction from school. She did vaguely remember some houses, like the residence of that punk whom she made cry in junior high when she beat him out for the position of math team captain. What a weakling. Oddly enough, a party there ended up being the place where she had her first kiss, an awkward affair with a straight girl who proceeded to avoid her for the rest of the year. Yes, this neighborhood had all sorts of memories. What she didn’t want was for her last experience in it to be her own murder at the hands of an aggravated pet owner.

    Excitement growing, Jinsoul almost squealed in relief when she spotted the tip of a grey tail flitting from behind a nearby tree in the yard of a yellow-painted house. I’ve got you now, she thought, cracking her knuckles and stealthily creeping closer. She was so close that she could practically taste victory as she reached her hands out… until her eyes made contact with an amber feline pair. Frozen in place, Jinsoul could only watch the cat tilt its head, poised to spring. It waited that extra second— just becaus