Burning Cat

As part of Stories and other things I am ashamed of.

   5/28/2010

     So this story's origin begins in the Former Soviet Union.

     My mother was just a little girl and she lived with her mother, father, and her siblings in a small town of what is now Russia. Well back then Christian persecution was really big, and it just so happened that there was an old lady living next door who absolutely hated Christians, although no one quite knew why

      They lived on a farm and their income would come in farming what little land they had and getting resources from the little number of animals they had and then miscellaneous tasks like sewing (my mother was an excellent seamstress) and making bread just to scrape by. Well my grandfather worked the barn and at night he would lock up the animals to keep them safe because of how dependent they were on them. 

     One late afternoon my Grandpa was walking to the barn when he saw a black cat run in. He went in there to chase it out, but when he got in there he saw that the black cat was holding matches. It tried striking a few matches but was unsuccessful. It pulled out another; this one looked like it was going to spark, and thinking quickly my grandpa grabbed a broom.

     He ran at the cat and hit it on its right side very hard. The cat screeched dropped its matches screamed a terrible cry and ran off limping. The next day when the whole family was out working they saw their next door neighbor wearing two casts: one on her arm and another on her leg on her right side. The exact spots my grandpa hat hit that cat with the broom. From that moment on they knew the old lady next door was a witch.

They had always felt an evil presence whenever she was around and sometimes she could hear her chanting curses at them, and keep in mind the only language the lady could speak was Russian, so it wasn't that she was speaking another language.