Word for Word: Haircut

I’m in a writers’ group that meets on Zoom, though before the pandemic we met in person. Every week, we do a writing prompt: someone gives a page number, and our organizer picks a word from a huge dictionary. In this example, the word is: Haircut.

It was after midnight, and I had dozed off on the fainting couch while reading a book about demons. I rubbed my eyes and stretched… and heard a rustling sound behind the couch. I tensed, and my heart raced. The only light came from moonlight streaming through a window with lace curtains and the table lamp by which I had read before falling asleep.

Fully awakened by fear, I leaped off the couch, dashed across the room, and grabbed the poker from the rack of fireplace tools by the cold hearth.

A shadowy form appeared from behind the couch. All I could see was its glowing yellow eyes and what appeared to be several feet of hair, as though it were a person who’d never had a haircut.

I gripped the poker and kept my eyes on the creature. It leapt onto the back of the couch… and looked drastically smaller than I had first thought.

The creature stretched out its neck and began choking. “Hack! Hack! Hack!” It hacked once more and vomited out a hairball.

That was when I realized it was my cat, Gabriel.