13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days

Save the Cat

6 min readJun 24, 2021

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Paul was a serious writer.

Of course, he’d never tell it in such direct terms. Instead, he would describe how on that fateful morning he was sitting alone under an old oak tree in the bad part of town, wearing a beret, and thinking about the human condition. “Show don’t tell” was the Golden Rule of writing and the motto Paul lived by.

He leaned back into the oak tree’s trunk, which was gnarled and haunted, an observation that took hours of brainstorming and several revisions to make. He contemplated the abandoned street in front of him and thought how each one of us is an abandoned street, served by a half-built trolley line whose tracks stopped being laid the moment we say goodbye to the last innocence of our youth. He pulled out his prized possession, a gold-plated antique pen molded to look like an old rifle, and wrote that down in his notebook.

In the middle of the street he saw a black cat. Paul could have described what it looked like, how its fur was darker than a Salem midnight, or mentioned that black cats are often portents of disaster. But he was a seasoned and confident writer, so he just saw a black cat and trusted the world would understand all that might imply. The cat paused in the middle of the street to lick one of its paws. Paul smiled. He was a serious writer, but he was not above finding little cats adorable.

He heard the car before he saw it. It pierced the morning stillness and sent the crows flying from blocks away. An unmuffled antique roadster came screaming down the abandoned street like a bat of hell. (Paul could have thought of a less cliched way to describe this car, but he’s not the narrator of this story. He would also never use parentheses.) The roadster took a blind turn with wheels barely touching the street. Paul’s writerly senses kicked in, leaving him with one thought.

Save the cat.

He leapt from the tree and ran to the street, thinking only of rescuing his tiny new friend. He scooped her up at the last second, cradled her in his arms, and rolled away from the car.

The driver, who had been checking LinkedIn and not paying attention to the road, noticed Paul at the last moment and lost control of the vehicle. He swerved right into the old oak tree and the car burst into flames.

Paul held the cat close and regarded the wreckage. He watched as the old tree absorbed the flames, its years of neglect hardening itself into something that could withstand even the most traumatic accident, and realized he was right to spend so much time describing the old tree.

When the flames subsided, Paul investigated the crash. The driver died on impact. The old tree would survive. He wondered what it all meant.

A long black limousine — to another’s eyes it may have been a hearse, but to Paul that seemed too on the nose — pulled up in front of the tree. A mysterious stranger with long arms stepped out of the car. He was dressed all in black and wore tiny sunglasses. The man looked at the wreckage, then to Paul, then upon the cat. He began to quiver.

“No,” the mysterious stranger whispered. “Impossible.”

“Anything is possible in the mind of a writer,” Paul said.

“The cat was meant to die,” the stranger said. “The cat needs to die. In every scenario the cat dies. It is the only way.”

Paul pulled his new friend close. The cat nuzzled against his neck.

“Do you realize how much evil you have just unleashed?” the stranger asked.

“Saving a cat is the easiest way to create a sympathetic character,” Paul said. “It’s one of the first rules of writing. I’m the good guy in this story.”

The stranger shook his head. In the distance, they heard thunder. Paul thought nothing of it. A dark and stormy night was as hackneyed a move as the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger with long arms.

“If that cat is not destroyed immediately, 1,000 years of doom and darkness will befall this town,” the stranger said, waving his long arms like one of those inflatable tube men outside a car dealership.

Paul laughed.

“Isn’t that a little uncreative?” he asked. “1,000 years of darkness is a tired trope. What about 1,000 years of sunshine and beauty, but we all go blind? What if instead of doom, the cat unleashed the most powerful love I’ve ever known, but she will remain forever just out of reach, haunting me like a shadow?”

The stranger stared at him.

“That cat contains a curse created before the dawn of mankind,” he said. “It moves among this world wantonly, destructively, and carefully — ”

Paul held up a hand.

“Enough with the adverbs,” he said. “Throw your thesaurus away and just say what you mean.”

The man leaned forward. His breath smelled of peppermint and secrets. Paul backed up and pulled the cat close.

“You are not listening,” the man said. “This is very, very, very important.”

“I find you never need to say the word ‘very,’” Paul said, petting the cat. “You could just tell me this is important. Same effect. Or say it’s vital.”

The man took off his tiny sunglasses. His eyes were all pupils.

“It is clear to me that you cannot fathom the calamitous nature of the insidious and primeval force that you are about to unleash on the denizens of this community,” the man said.

Paul rolled his eyes.

“Don’t use five-dollar words when a 50-cent word will suffice,” he said.

The man blinked.

“That’s Mark Twain,” Paul said. “Come on, man.”

“Please,” the man said. “I must destroy the cat.”

Paul shook his head.

“I’m saving the cat. It’s the only way.”

The man rushed forward, Paul reached into his pocket and grabbed his antique rifle pen, the Chekhov’s Gun that he’d been waiting to discharge since paragraph three. He held it out and plunged it into the man’s throat. The man’s eyes went wide. Paul pulled him close.

“It had to be like this,” Paul said. “If you describe a pen that looks like a gun in paragraph three, it has to be embedded into the throat of a mysterious stranger before the end of the story.”

Paul removed the pen. The man coughed. Blood poured from his mouth. They locked eyes for a moment. Then he fell to the ground.

Paul looked at the haunted old oak tree, then at the wreckage of the roadster, then at the mysterious man’s lifeless body. The air suddenly felt very cold. He held the cat close. She mewed softly.

“I’m the good guy in this story,” Paul said.

He returned to his tidy apartment and poured the cat a saucer of milk. He watched as she lapped it up. He looked out the window. A fissure appeared on the horizon. Ancient beings, twice the size of skyscrapers crawled out. On the street below, he could hear women and children screaming in agony. He closed the blinds.

“That has to be unrelated,” he said to the cat. “Inserting ancient beings twice the size of skyscrapers without mentioning them earlier is not a twist ending. That’s just bad writing.”

He pulled out his typewriter and began a story about a lonely funeral home operator. The ground began to quake. The cat nuzzled against his leg.

The only rule of 13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days is I must post the story the day I finish writing it.

13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days

Save the Cat

Written by Mark Macyk