Warning: Cats Eyes Removed — A Story by Die Booth

This is a story from the June 2025 issue of Worlds of Possibility. You can listen to this story and an interview with Die Booth about his creative process on the OMG Julia Podcast. You can also read the story below, and read the trascript of the interview (as well as see a couple more talisman pictures) here.

Content note: This story takes place in a post apocalyptic world, but does NOT include any animal cruelty. There are no actual cats in it at all. Cats eyes are an old fashioned style of road reflector studs made of colored glass.

This story is 1,082 words.

Warning: Cats Eyes Removed
by Die Booth

“See, I told you,” Jill said, “I told you Mac said they were here.”

It’s a dark night. Just a sliver of moon like melted ice. The stars shine like eyes between freezing clouds. When Jill sweeps her torch across the cracked ground, the stars blink back from beneath our feet.

I drop to my knees. “They’re beautiful.”

“The stars are beautiful,” Jill says. She tips her head back. Her throat looks blue in the cold below light, her breath spewing in misty plumes. The air glitters with drizzle, catching like sparks in the torch beam. “What do we do now?”

I take out my knife. Jill hums. “It seems a shame.”

“Nobody needs them now.”

“The stars?”

I laugh. I look around me and I think, probably. It’s dark early. Winter has stopped the world with a glaze of frost, turning it all to hammered silver, from the bushes at the sides of the motorway, to the cracking asphalt underfoot.

“The roads.” It’s strange to remember places like this raging with cars, trucks, traffic. Everywhere is quiet as a held breath now, the freezing midnight air thin in my lungs.

I think Jill remembers, too, because she says, “They’re like archaeology now though. How many are left where they were - what do they call it — in-situ?”

I shrug, the movement sending my scarf up around my nose as I hunch over. Poke the little blade of my knife at the edge of one bright eye, scraping the casing, my breath fogging damp and prickly in its cocoon of wool. I tug the scarf down, cold stinging my nose. The eye is stubborn. Fisting the knife, I stab down through the dirty white skull of perished rubber, breaking it open. “If we don’t take them, somebody else will. Eventually.”

“Yeah,” Jill says, vaguely. Her feet shuffle black tracks, backwards, as she reverses through the frost to the concrete overpass wall, leaning against it and watching me.

I decapitate the road stud. The eyes inside, two pairs facing forward and back, are held in place with pins. “Don’t you want one for Mona?” She smiles at that, turning her head to the side like she thinks I won’t see. It makes me smile, too. I jam the knife blade beneath one of the pins and pop the eye from its socket, sparkling like a precious stone. It’s coated in tarry stuff: I rub it on my glove. “Look – they’re copper ones! That’s the oldest type. It must be more than a hundred years old. You can thread it on a necklace for her.”

“Show me.” Jill leans in for a look. The expression on her face makes her seem ten again, floating pale in the torchlight. I think of fairgrounds, fetes and zoos. Of our parents being friends. I think of road-trips, thirty years ago, when it felt forever sunny, us on the back seat. Hot leather upholstery that stuck to the pits of your knees, the smell of sandy beach and petrol fumes and bitumen melting.

When I hand her the cats eye, I’m passing her more than a physical thing. I’m handing her our past.

She studies it in the torch beam, glove-muffled hands turning over a flash of jewel-green. “It’s cracked.”

“I’ll get you another one.”

“No,” she says. “Look.” I look, as the flat of glass inside the crack blazes torchlight back. “The broken ones shine even brighter.” She slips it carefully into her pocket.

 I say, “Remember when you told me you liked girls, and I said, me too?”

“And I yelled at you for always copying me.” Jill’s chiming laugh is swallowed up by the vast road, the big sky. It makes us seem small. But not in a frightening way. It’s comforting, somehow, like being a seed in a field. I can remember that moment as clear as day. But not you. No, that would be weird. Jill struck gold with her first serious girlfriend. I had my heart broken by musicians for decades until I met Hannah and realised what I’d been missing.

“Do you miss being little?” I ask.

Jill tilts her head to one side. It’s not just a question about age. It’s about before. A thing too huge to hold in one thought. “Not really,” she says, after a minute. “It was all rush and noise. I didn’t realise how much it was until it stopped. And it stopped for everyone so you couldn’t be jealous that you were missing out on anything. I like being able to hear my heart beat.”

I close my eyes. My cheeks above my scarf feel taut with chill, my eyes watering with it. I can feel misty rain clinging to my eyelashes. The wind sighs, quiet, rattling the branches of the trees. There’s the smell of wet leaves, and damp wool, and that nostalgic tarry edge of scent only noticeable on the old roads. My toes are starting to ache where they’re pressed up in my boots. I shift my weight, digging into the next cats eye. “Don’t take them all,” Jill says.

“I’ll leave one. In situ.”

“Leave two, so they don’t get lonely being the last one.”

This is why we’ve been friends forever, I think.

When I’ve dug up all the treasure, except for two, I stand, knees cracking, pockets full of stars. The sky is clearer now, a waiting kind of still. I’m so ready to feel the fire in the hearth at home, unpicking me with pins and needles.

“They’ll keep us safe travelling,” I say to Jill. It doesn’t matter that the most journeying we do now is on foot between villages, choosing new paths over the cold old roads. Fishing out an eye, I show it to the starlight. A memory we can carry around with us.

“What have these eyes seen.” Jill says. She sounds like she’s talking to herself, and it’s not really a question. When I close my fist around the eye in my palm, it warms quickly, the copper taking on my blood heat. “What will they see now?”

It’s a long walk home. We should get going. She yawns, and I sling an arm around her shoulders, and we zigzag across the lanes, like the plants pushing up through the cracks in the tarmac.

Only once do I look back, and see two pairs of eyes, shining in the night.

I think, that’s what those eyes see looking back at them, too.

About the Author

Die Booth is an indie author and editor who loves wild beaches and exploring dark places. When not writing, he enjoys making zines, and DJs alongside his boyfriend at Last Rites – the best (and only) goth club in Chester, UK. You can read his prize-winning stories in volumes from The Deadlands, Egaeus Press, Sans. PRESS and many others. His books, including his cursed novella Cool S are available online and he’s currently working on a queer coming-of-age folk horror novella. You can find out more about Die’s writing at http://diebooth.wordpress.com/ or say hi at Bluesky @diebooth.bsky.social