[Anna swirled the brandy some more and observed the liquid’s widening gyre. She drained the glass and threw it against the wall, watching as it fell apart. Anna had no innocence to be drowned, and she was certainly full of passionate intensity; she welcomed the mere anarchy, and bathed in the blood-dimmed tide. She would deafen that fucking falcon herself if it came to that. Perhaps the long-awaited rough beast was neither Acorn nor Minos, but Anna herself. But towards what destination was Anna slouching? She] dressed quietly and went out to the new barn. [She was going to find that fucking cat. Someone was going to die today.] Anna looked for the cat in the straw and on the rafters of Acorn’s stall. The [little fucker] wasn’t there. Acorn nuzzled Anna’s shoulder sleepily. “I’m going to [exterminate from this world every trace of that goddamn] cat,” she told him. [But Acorn wouldn’t meet her eye.] [Anna was accustomed to Acorn’s pensive moods, especially after he returned from one of his mysterious disappearances. She’d never begrudge him the time it takes to clear one’s brain of a new Darkness (or to wait for the new Darkness to spread until the whole brain is uniformly tainted and therefore uniformly purified). But this felt different. Was this the cat’s doing? she asked herself. Or has Acorn finally gnawed through the last thread that connected him to sanity, as I always knew he eventually would?] Anna looked in the rest of the horse stalls. No cat[echism could assuage the fear that coursed through her, as religion is helpless in the face of that which is inherently and insistently not only godless and ungodly, but even god-negating.] No cat[harsis was to be had today, Anna knew. “κάθαρσις,” she said aloud, then shook her head sadly. Her soul would remain unpurged.] No[,] cat[atonia was not the answer either; it was far too late to hide or feign unresponsiveness.] Pam and [Pawnee] came into the old barn. “Did you find the cat[egorical imperative that I explained to you last night to be helpful in your struggle to understand morality?” Pawnee asked.] “No,” said Anna. “[I believe that we live in a post-Kantian world. Also, the cat’s still fucking missing.”] “Maybe he went into the woods,” said [Pawnee, while drinking peppermint schnapps straight from the bottle. She had a serious problem.] #DetectivePony