Loneliness

May 31, 2026

Narrative outline for a creepy story:

Claudia Tolliver, 74, lives alone in a four-story walkup. Has a fancy for the superintendent. Loves her two cats. Only real friends. Loves her garden on the roof.
She takes her cats up on sunny days. They lie with her in the garden bed.
She notices one of her cats is thin one day, too thin.
Cancer.
The cat has to be put down.
It is.
On an impulse at the vet’s she steals a Persian cat from a carrier in a deserted hallway.
She has shocked herself, but justifies it that the other cat shouldn’t be alone.

She’s guilty about the theft, but she loves the Persian. Her two cats get along. She takes them to the rooftop garden.
Late summer, she notices her cat is skinnier than the Persian, sluggish, weak in the direct sun. She’s concerned.
She stops bringing them up to the roof garden together. Doesn’t want her sick cat to be alone. She’s always solicitous of them being together and not separated.
Doesn’t want them lonely.

Soon after, coming down the stairwell, she hears a dog bark at her— but not just bark, snarl violently behind its apartment door.
This happens repeatedly.
It doesn’t seem to do it with anyone else. It hurts her feelings at first.
There is no way the dog can know it is her.
This begins to unsettle her.
She begins to test different ways of disguising who she is to see if she can past without the raging dog.
Nothing works. It doesn’t matter whether she walks softly, removes her perfume...
Eventually, she stands on the stairwell as it rages, terror settling in.
The dog just knows it is her.

One afternoon in the garden alone now, a dog begins to snarl at her from behind the heavy rooftop fire door.
She cracks the fire door and tries to calm it.
It is rabid, hateful, horrible. It’s the first time she’s seen the dog up close.
She is afraid to leave the rooftop.
The dog settles abruptly.
The superintendent is behind the door.
Is it his? No.
Can you please take it away? He does.
Later, she comforts herself in her apartment with the cats, sitting on the kitchen floor.
Her original cat is wasting away, dying.

She starts to follow other neighbors into the building so that she won’t have to walk by the dog’s door alone.
But… there is no barking when she is together with someone.
Her courage grows. She knocks on the apartment door to speak to the owner.
The dog is quiet, affectionate now. There is no hate in its eyes. It is so friendly in her presence, she feels too foolish to mention the problem.
It is only one-on-one that the dog barks at her.
When she gets near her living room wall, another dog begins to bark.
She sits with her two cats in the dark, the one listless on her lap.
She whispers absently that she needs to bring it in.
She does not.

She encounters a rat in the street. It hisses at her, skirts around her in a tightening perimeter, looking for an angle to race at her.
A second rat appears and the first settles.
A man walking his dogs passes by and she escapes, keeping close to him.
The man enters his apartment building unexpectedly.
When she turns back, the rat is tracking her with its eyes.

She doesn’t take her cat to be put down. It is dying in her lap.
When it dies, she’s afraid to remove it. She doesn’t want to be alone with the Persian.
The Persian begins to swat, hiss and slash at her.
She drives it out into the hallway. It continues from behind the door. She stands in the kitchen helpless.
Her dead cat still lies on a towel on the kitchen floor.

The superintendent knocks on the door.
Oh, so very, very gently.
He doesn’t, won’t go away.
“Just checking on you,” he says.
The insistence in the knocking grows.
“Are you alright in there? Are you alright in there?”
He won’t go away.
She’s terrified to answer the door and have him alone with her.
She sits on the kitchen floor with the dead cat in her lap, petting it, using it to soothe herself from the knocking at the door that will not go away.

Yikes!