Short Stories

1. The Black Cat

An animal lover has a beloved pet cat named Pluto. Over the years, the man becomes a violent, abusive drunk, which causes the cat to avoid him. One night in a drunken rage, he cuts the cat's eye out. The next morning, he's mortified because of what he's done. Over the next few days he starts feeling contrary, and just out of spite he hangs it from a tree. That night, his house burns down. Later he finds a new home to rent, and inside he finds a cat. No one owns her, so he takes her and thinks he'll redeem himself, but he begins to loathe this cat just as much as the first. One night as he was heading to the basement, the cat nearly knocks him down the stairs. During another fit of rage, he picks up the axe to kill the cat, but he is stopped by his wife. That enrages him even further, so he kills his wife instead. He puts her in the wall, and goes to kill the cat and toss it in but cannot find it. When the police come around, he's so sure of his plot that he brags to them about the sturdiness of his home and taps on the wall. When he does, the cat starts yowling from inside the wall, because he had accidentally put it in the wall too.