Well, sometimes one has to admit when they’ve run up on a failure. I was attempting with this one to capture something of the tone and style of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz, but I didn’t manage it. There’s a touch of it, but it just didn’t work out the way I was hoping it would. Ah well! Live and learn.
Organ Meat
(A Flash Story by Maggie Slater)
In a small town, down a dirt road, in a big house, there lived an angry old man. He had a lovely young wife who loved cats. Every day, she would walk three miles into town to buy organ meat from the butcher’s boy, and every night she would feed the strays that gathered on the front steps of the big house.
The butcher’s boy was young and had a quick smile and strong shoulders. In town, there were whispers that she spent too much time looking at him as he packaged her tidbits of meat. The old man grew jealous.
Then one summer evening, the old man’s wife tripped and fell from the front steps and died. The old man took up feeding the cats, bits of heart, bits of liver, bits of kidney. The cats ate it all.
Then the old man grew tired of the cats and shooed them away, but the cats returned each night, yowling on the steps. Night after night, the old man flung open the front door and yelled at the cats, until they ran off.
He couldn’t sleep. Each time he lay himself down in bed, the yowling began again. He tried throwing books from his window. He threw pails of water. He threw his iron paperweight.
On the tenth night of this, he became ill and called for the doctor. The doctor found him feverish and prescribed him a draught to help him sleep through the racket. After the doctor gave him the medicine, the old man fell into a deep, dark sleep, and the doctor returned to town.
When the doctor came on his rounds the next morning, however, he found the old man dead at the foot of the front steps, surrounded by cats. They had dragged him out of the house and eaten every organ except his heart.