Alphabet Soup

Alphabet Soup

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Alphabet Soup
Alphabet Soup
Alternative Fun Facts: A Cat’s Last Words

Alternative Fun Facts: A Cat’s Last Words

Too Painful For Words | Fiction | Fresh Soup

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Etgar Keret
May 06, 2025
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Alphabet Soup
Alphabet Soup
Alternative Fun Facts: A Cat’s Last Words
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Writing a story is a bit like dreaming. In both states, you’re willing to briefly relinquish your obsessive need for control in order to let something else inside you reveal itself. The powerful experience of getting lost in a dream, or in a story, can be an incredible adventure, but sometimes it’s also a destabilizing experience: a kind of nightmare. When you finish writing some stories, you’re left with a comforting spark of humanity that glows warmly inside you for hours, even days. Other stories, like the one you’re about to read, leave you feeling relieved to have them behind you and you never want to sit down and write them again.
Illustration by alashi

The discovery that animals can talk was made by Professor Shraga Gur under tragic circumstances. His Angora cat, Tzumi, tried to bite the power cord coming out of the space heater next to the bed, and was electrocuted. As he twitched his final twitches, Tzumi suddenly said, in a lucid and almost human voice: “I hate you, Shraga. You’re a piece of shit.” And then he died. This distressing incident led Professor Gur to investigate the correlation between speech and suffering, and he discovered that every living mammal that finds itself in pain or extreme suffering will immediately adapt the capacity to speak.

Professor Gur’s groundbreaking research earned the lonesome zoologist a Nobel Prize. At the ceremony, with tears in his eyes, Shraga confessed that, although he in no way wished to diminish the importance of the prize, if he could give up the Nobel and all his other honors for the chance to hear Tzumi whisper to him, “Shraga, you’re a good man,” he would do so without hesitation.

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