"The Cat's Gas" (811 words)

I'm going to share a short story with you, since I'm pretty darn sure it will never see print. I wrote it as a bit of a gag, and it might cause you to gag as well. You see, I had an assignment in a creative writing class last year which required us to take an implausible or unlikely idea and use it in a story. I told myself that I would make the first thing that came to mind into the first sentence of the story. Thus, it begins...

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Goddamned cat farts saved my life. Aunt Marmalade says she saved my life, but she’s just the one who gave Siam the old milk in the first place. It was the farts that did it. What’s that? The cat? No she’s not Siamese, why? Are they known for farting or something? …Oh, the name. That never occurred to me before: Siam… Siamese. Ha! But yeah, Aunt Marm was staying with my wife Peggy and I that weekend on a visit, then drank too much wine to drive home. At her place, she’s got nine cats, and the last thing she does before going to bed is to put out bowls of milk. She must go through a gallon a day at that rate. What she just doesn’t get is that cats aren’t meant to drink cow milk. It gives them the shits. That’s what the vet said! Well, not in so many words, but still, the shits. And Marm, she lost her sense of smell years ago from smoking, so she isn’t bothered by the stench of her house. But anyway, she wouldn’t go to sleep until we let her put out a saucer for Siam, in the little laundry room that leads to the back door. It’s where the cat sleeps.

So here’s the part you’ve heard, about how the Suburban Slasher himself broke in through our back door. I don’t know why he chose our house for this particular holiday. The last couple he did in was some well-off professional couple in Orange County. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing alike between us and them, and the police couldn’t figure it out either. Me, scared? Well yeah, when we first found him and learned who he was, but I’m over it now. It was nearly a year ago, and we really landed on our feet. We’re doing fine now.

In the morning, we found his body sprawled in the laundry room, with that Siam sleeping away on top of him. Peggy swore that the stench was from the body, but I told her she was dumb, that it couldn’t have rotted that fast. Siam just looked up at us with her big green eyes and meowed. We were crouching and just about to poke the thing when Aunt Marmalade stumbled in behind us and screamed. I nearly jumped out of my skin. That’s when Siam farted, kind of a squeaking gasp out her rear, flooding my sense of smell. Eyes watering, I immediately knew what the smell in the room was. I told Peggy and Marm. I said to them, “Jesus, but I do believe our cat farted this man to death!” The women just looked at each other dumbly and then back at the cat.

I called the cops, not knowing then who we had in our laundry room serving as a cat pillow.

The first car took a long time to get there. I think it was because the police didn’t believe me. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the cat farts when I called 911. When they saw the body though, they called their sergeant in right quick. They fingerprinted the body, and put us up in a motel for that night and the next. We locked Siam out of the house… We all agreed we didn’t want her stinking up the motel room and killing us too!

Next day, the sergeant came by our room and told us that they had positively identified the serial killer and that the reward was ours. We didn’t even know there was one… twenty thousand dollars! What? The farts? You don’t believe they killed him. Well, they did, and the coroner’s report says so. Not in so many words maybe, but the meaning is there. See, as it turns out, this killer was highly allergic to milk, himself. Siam, since she couldn’t digest that milk, had released molecules of the milk protein into the air, and sure enough that killer must have gagged at the smell, or coughed, and inhaled enough of it to cause him to faint on the spot. I’m pretty sure the coroner said it was something called a “prophylactic sock” that made him pass out. His face landed in Siam’s water bowl, and he drowned. Simple as that.

Peggy and I took that reward, and it just didn’t feel right to spend it on ourselves, so we talked for a long time and decided that we’d start this here cat adoption shelter. We’re still getting on our feet with it, but we’ve saved some lives and think it’s going to work out real well. The Siam Cat Adoption Team, we call it, after our heroic kitty. I didn’t think much of her before, I’m the first to admit, but since she saved my life, I’ve come to love the little stinker.