Venom

I parked my car in the basement and was walking towards the elevator when I saw him - wearing a dirty dhoti and a dirty white shirt, stooping a little. There was some movement near his feet. Cats, I noticed a moment later, many of them. But the reason I noticed him – the silence.
Ever since I can remember, I have been able to read people’s minds and see a tinted haze, kind of like an aura, around them. The tint depends on their mood at the given time. Reading minds, seeing the haze – super powers in the eyes of fiction writers, but an annoying hindrance to life in my opinion. It’s always buzzing in my ears, I suffer constant headaches, and my eyes are always clouded by mists of too many colors. Kind of like watching static on TV for a long time. 

Which is why, he was different. It was late evening, and the basement was dark. But I could still make out his haze was absent. And the silence emanating from his mind was frighteningly loud. I stood and stared. One of the cats fiercely hissed at me. The man and the cats stood a few feet away from me, but no sooner than the cat hissed at me, I felt a sharp pain at the corner of my lips. I put my hand to my lips and saw my fingers covered in blood. I gasped. I turned to run towards the elevator. The heel of my right shoe broke and I stumbled. Suddenly, a hand grasped my throat. I tried to pry them off. But when my fingers touched my neck frantically, there was no hand there.  I felt a warm liquid around my neck. More blood. I tried to turn around to defend myself. A paw scratched my left eye. But with my right eye, I saw the man with the silent mind still far away. Pain shot up. I didn’t know how he was doing it, how the cats were doing it. 
I was down on the ground. I had stopped struggling. I felt the life leaving me, when one of the cats climbed on me, kept a paw on my throat and hissed. I could hear its feral thoughts – I had only been able to read human minds till now.“You think you’re so powerful, leaving everyone vulnerable because of you know what’s going on in their minds. You judgmental, arrogant creature. You’re thoughts are venomous. How does it feel to have someone do it to you?”
I felt the last breath leaving me.
This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.Copyright Petrichor and Clouds 2013 at petrichorandclouds.blogspot.com Please do not reproduce the material published here.