byChrisWhite – 2025

This was created as a result of a flash fiction challenge from Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge page, #FFFC #308 called the Tunnel. This is a 500 words or less challenge using the photo attached (Tunnel with a Cat) as the actual prompt. The goal was to think about the photo, then create a story that would describe the meaning behind the photo. I hope you enjoy.

The road unfurled before me, a thin ribbon of asphalt barely wide enough for the wheels that carried me, hemmed in by steel guardrails dulled by time, by the salted breath of winter, by the slow patient corrosion of the world. Beyond them, the land sloped upward, the mountain’s jagged face etched with old scars, wounds from the pickaxes of men long dead, their hands forgotten, their toil buried beneath lichen and crumbling stone.

The tunnel’s mouth gaped black and wide, a silent demand, a question, a thing that had been waiting long before I arrived. The signs had warned me, Falling Rocks. Reduced Visibility. Enter at Your Own Risk. But no sign, no warning, no roadside cautionary could have prepared me for the thing that stared back from the other side.

A cat.

Not a cat as we know them, not a creature of alleyways or hearths, not the soft thing curled beside fireplaces in warm-lit rooms. No, this was something else. Its face filled the tunnel’s mouth entirely, whiskers sweeping against the stone walls like fragile cables trembling under tension, its ears swallowed by the dark, its body an unseen vastness stretching past the limits of sight. The eyes, twin lanterns, molten gold, unblinking. Watching. Measuring. Waiting.

The car idled beneath my hands, its hum feeble, mechanical, irrelevant against the weight of something older, patient, inevitable. My pulse hammered in my throat, my skin alive with something electric, a recognition that ran deeper than logic. A thing not meant to be seen had seen me.

I gripped the wheel, every inch of my body screaming to reverse, to flee, but the road behind was emptiness, no headlights, no taillights, nothing but the long stretch back into nothingness. And ahead, the cat. The waiting.

The mind scrambles for reason, for the comfortable refuge of rationality, an illusion, a painted mural, a trick of the light. But the fur shifted, almost imperceptibly, a ripple of movement that sent dust swirling in the tunnel’s throat. And the breath, a breath. A slow, measured exhale that did not belong to me.

I was known.

The silence deepened. The cat tilted its head, deliberate, the movement slow enough to stretch time into something unbearable. Then, without malice, without hurry, its mouth parted, just enough.

Not a snarl. Not a growl. Not hunger.

An opening. A beckoning. An invitation.

The breath left my body in a shuddering rush, the weight of choice pressing down like the hand of God or something worse.

And then I drove forward.

Full-throttle.