Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Shannon looked at the heaping piles of meat in front of her on the table.  She’d signed up for this cooking class 4 months ago with her best friend Amy, but, like always, Amy bailed at the last minute and Shannon was stuck going alone.

The teacher was intense to say the least.  She was a little French woman with a heavy accent and curly white hair.  She was very passionate about cooking—and it definitely showed!  She certainly wasn’t afraid to yell at her students when they made a mistake.  She carried a wooden spoon that she would bang on the table to get their attention when they messed up.  Shannon was terrified of the woman, in all honesty.

They were making a bunch of dishes using a pig, the meat from which was piled high on the table in stacks.  All the students had placed the eyes in separate bowls.  Shannon got a weird feeling every time she looked at them, but she couldn’t stop herself from staring.  She felt like she was obsessing about the eyes a little too much but the idea of using them was just so foreign to her.

Shannon could hear the teacher talking but she was only half listening.  Those eyes were starting to haunt her.  The teacher was instructing the class on what to do next but Shannon didn’t care anymore.

Smack!  The wooden spoon banged on the table in front of Shannon.

“Keep your eyes peeled!” the teacher yelled before turning around and walking back to the front of the room.

Shannon picked up her pig eyes and, with her own eyes shut, began peeling them.

“Non!  Qu’est-ce que tu fais?!  Non, non, non,” the teacher screamed in Shannon’s direction.

Shannon turned around to see who was in trouble before realizing she was sitting in the last row and the teacher was staring directly at her.

“What?” Shannon asked.  She didn’t speak French.

“What are you doing?  Don’t peel the eyes, keep your eyes peeled for bad meat,” the teacher said.

“Oh, sorry,” Shannon said, putting the eyes down.

Shortly afterwards, Shannon packed up her bag and slipped out of the classroom, never to return.

Raining Cats and Dogs

You’re sitting on your couch in your house when you hear a big commotion outside.  You run to the door, pull it open and head into the light.  Squinting in the cloudy brightness, you make out the shape of a group of people.  They’re standing around something that looks like it might be an animal.  You’re fairly small so you work your way up to the front of the crowd.  It’s a dog.  There’s only a murmur coming from the back of the crowd now; the rest have fallen silent, shocked and pale.

You wonder what happened.  You wonder where this dog came from.  You wonder why it’s not wearing a collar and where it’s owner might be.  Everything is so mysterious, but the people are so intrigued.  It’s actually kind of nice, seeing that people still care about something.

You can’t stand the mystery for too long, though.  You turn to the man standing next to you and ask what happened.

“It fell,” he says, “fell right from the sky.”

As you’re about to ask for more of an explanation from the man you believe is clearly crazy, you hear another noise.  It sounds like a screech, high-pitched and full of fear.

That’s when you see it.  Something falling from the sky, tumbling towards the ground, terrified.

“It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!” you hear people shout.

“Wait,” one woman says, “it’s a cat!”

That’s insane, you think.  It’s not possible.

But, sure enough, it starts raining cats and dogs.