There were several employees in our office building but I couldn’t help but notice her. She was young, with shoulder-length jet-black hair. She was beautiful in an exotic way, and I caught her smiling at me when we passed in the hallway. She had found out that I was single and my house was a duplex with my mother living on the other side.

    One Friday afternoon as we were leaving the building, she was standing by the front door, crying. She said she had missed her ride and when I offered to drive her home, she looked up at me and wiped her eyes. That’s when I noticed her green eyes with golden flecks. She told me that her name was Ramona as we walked out to my car.

    She didn’t seem to notice me until the following Friday evening. “Will you give me a ride home?” she asked. When we arrived at her house, she invited me in. I followed her and Ramona asked me to sit on the couch while she made some tea. She had already placed candles in a circle on the living room floor. “Come, sit with me,” she said, as she sat on the floor cross-legged. There were two cups of tea beside her on a silver tray. I sat down in front of the couch as she opened a book of poems and proceeded to read them to me while I sipped the tea. It wasn’t like anything I had ever tasted, probably made with herbs, I thought. The candles flickered and her eyes got a strange look to them. “Call me Raven,” she said. I suddenly felt dizzy and woke up on her couch the next morning. As I was getting up to go home to shave and clean up, a cat was watching me. Its jet-black fur was sleek and shiny. I reached down to pet it and it hissed at me, then growled. A low, guttural sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end.

    I didn’t see Ramona at the office that day, but I had a strange desire to go back after work. She was there fixing supper and somehow knew that I’d be there. The candle-light poetry-reading sessions along with the herb tea continued and somehow, it seemed very natural to me that I would be staying there with her from then on. That night, we had just gone to bed when a violent thunderstorm came up suddenly. As lightning flashed through the bedroom window, the bed rose slightly, moved across the floor, hesitated, then slowly moved back. The evil presence I felt in the room was overwhelming. I looked over at Ramona and she appeared to be sleeping but there was a distinct smile on her face. I got up and walked into the living room but there was the cat, staring at me menacingly. I went back to bed but Ramona wasn’t there. The storm had subsided, and I was able to get back to sleep. The next morning, Ramona was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. “I don’t think your cat likes me,” I told her.

    “I don’t have a cat,” she said coldly. That day, she quit her job after a heated argument with her boss. She always flared up when things weren’t going her way and especially if I forgot and called her Ramona rather than Raven. I decided to talk with a minister on my way home, and he was visibly shaken when I told him about the evil presence I felt in our bedroom. He advised me to get away from her as soon as possible as he said he believed that she was possessed by a demon. As soon as I got to her house, I told Ramona of my plans to leave. She flew into a rage and raked my arms with her sharp fingernails. A neighbor heard her shrieking and called the police, believing that I must be killing her. An officer came to the house and noticed that she had no injuries but that my arms were bleeding and he drove me to the hospital. “It looks as if your cat got pretty mad at you,” an ER doctor said. I was too embarrassed to tell him that it wasn’t a cat. As he bandaged my arms and gave me a tetanus shot, he told me, “I’d get rid of that cat if I were you!” I smiled and nodded.

    The policeman gave me a ride to my mother’s house so I wouldn’t need to go back for my car that evening, and I found her sitting on her front porch. A jet-black cat with long, sleek fur was sprawled across her lap. “Look what just showed up on my doorstep. Isn’t she beautiful?” my mother gushed. The cat glared at me with yellow-green eyes, then stretched out its paws toward me and flexed its needle-like claws. “And just now, as I was sitting here,” my mother went on, “I thought of the perfect name for her.” I didn’t have to ask what it was. I already knew.