The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe

Who but Edgar could take the lovely feline found in so many cozy homes and turn it into a thing of horror? The narrator of  this story relates how he and his wife had several pets (birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey) but the most beautiful and sagacious was a cat.

This cat, named Pluto, was our narrator’s favorite pet and play-mate. Yet through great intemperance, he seizes it one night and cuts its eye out of the socket. As you can well imagine, the cat avoids him after this, but is unable to avoid its ultimate demise at the hands of its owner who hangs the cat in a nearby garden.

In the middle of the night he and his wife are awakened by a terrible fire. Their home is burned completely, yet the neighbors are entranced by the one remaining wall, the one on which the bedstead rested, which bears the image of a cat upon its freshly laid plaster.

Although the narrator procures a second cat of black, with a white patch ever more resembling the gallows in his mind, there is no rest from the evil which now seems to be taking over. Even the wife is not spared her husband’s guilty wrath, or the influence of a creature out for revenge, whichever way the reader intends to interpret the story. How easy it would be to place the blame of one’s evil actions on an innocent creature, when they can only be placed squarely on our own imperfect nature.

Still, when the leaves turn their edges into golden crispness, and the dusk falls sooner than it did a few weeks ago, it is somehow pleasant to think of black cats…to wonder that if they are wronged, they will somehow cause the truth to prevail.