These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No, these are the other stories.

Cat litter and a few drops of blood, written by Luke Condor, narrated by Ian McEwan.

Joseph J. Cooper made two mistakes on that Thursday evening when he returned home from work.

The first mistake was that as he entered the house, kicked off his shoes, through his suit

jacket over the banister rail, he paid little to no attention to the droplets of red that

danced up the wood stairs and into the bathroom. He was tired, though. A long day at the office, half on the

phone to the sales manager, the other half on Reddit writing angry replies to people who clearly

didn't understand the ending of Lost. Too tired, then. Let's put it down to that. Those metallic red drops peppering the wood were left untouched, unquestioned.

Though Joseph couldn't have been that tired, could he? He wasn't too tired to hear the sound of his wife, Ilana, upstairs in the shower, singing out of key to some K-pop band he'd never

heard before, or to smell the lasagna cooking in the oven in the kitchen, or to notice how the

living room floor was immaculate. It gleamed. Had Ilana polished it, bleached it? So then his second mistake was as he walked through the living room and into the kitchen,

further and into the pantry, he chose to ignore the fresh turds in the litter tray.

Mr. Snuffles had been busy.

He'd left a nice little welcome home present for Joseph to clean up, to empty, to put a new liner on, top with fresh cat litter.

But he didn't.

Joseph's second mistake was looking down at that soiled litter tray, shrugging, and deciding instead to go into the fridge, neatly arranged and removed of all out-of-date veg,

and grabbing a bottle of that lime-flavored lager he'd been looking forward to since lunch that afternoon.

He popped open the lid, placed the bottle top in the bin, and sat down at the kitchen table.

As he flipped his phone out of his pocket and scoured through his Facebook feed,

he sniffed his bottle of lager and took two large gulps.

Ah!

...