The laundromat was packed this afternoon, and I had to wait to get a dryer. While I was sitting and reading, waiting for the clothes to run through, a guy sat next to me reading an anthology of what turned out to be revenge stories. At first I thought it was a book of humor because he kept cracking up. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, he turned to the man sitting on his other side and said, “Get this! There are these people, right. and they’re standing on a wall, and they see this mother cat with her kittens down below. So this guy, he decides to drop a stone down near them so they’ll wonder what it is. So he does it and….” (here the guy could hardly contain his laughter) “he kills a kitten with it!”

The other guy laughed a little weakly, and the reader said, “I guess you had to be there.”

He was, of course, reading Bram Stoker’s short story, “The Squaw.” A few minutes later he began chortling again, presumably at the part where the man who’d accidentally killed the kitten gets crushed inside an Iron Maiden.