Decay. It was all around me, especially when I smelled last week's jockey shorts. A sense of dread and foreboding hovered over me as I petted my black cat. Perhaps it was because I don't have a black cat. But there it was under my hand, purring like it just hit the Lucky Lotto jackpot. It was this cat's face, however, its horrible face, that filled me with the most dread of all. For on its face the cat had a--I shudder to tell you--a smile with gleaming, sharp white teeth. It was a smile that seemed the smile of the devil himself just as he's about to drag you down to Hades. A smile not unlike a politician's.

"Out, loathed creature!" I cried. "No more will you destroy what remains of my happiness on this sorrowful coil." But the cat just sat there and smiled all the more at my remarks. "Why do you smile, you devilish fiend? What pleases you so?" It was then that the cat uttered a word that would sear my brain, a word that sounded like a cat's meow but I swear was the word "more."

"What do you mean by such a fantastic utterance, you thing of Satan?" I cried. "Have I not already given you a can of Kal-Kan Salmon Surprise?"

"More," was the fiend's reply. I ransacked the cupboards for cat food, but none there was. I tore open the refrigerator, grabbed a nearly empty carton of milk and poured it into a bowl which the phantasm greedily drank up. It then rubbed its head against my chest and said, "More."

"No! No!" I screamed. "I have no more. Do you hear me? I am bled dry."

But this only caused the fiendish feline to rub its body all the more against me and demand, "More."

By this time I was nearly mad with apoplexy. I turned the house upside down, looking for something, anything with which to feed this terrible, insatiable ghoul. It waited patiently on the counter, watching me with its evil eye. It was at that moment that I knew what I must do. I opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out a butcher knife. I lifted it up over that thing of evil and was about to bring it down with every remaining ounce of strength in my being, when the cat looked up with that frightening grin and said, "OK, I'm full."

I put the knife back in the drawer, collapsed in a chair and spent the rest of the evening playing chess with my charcoal visitor and getting my pants beat off.