"Will somebody turn off that cat?!" Brian yelled from the kitchen. "I'm trying to study for my finals here!"

"Cats don't have switches," his identical twin brother, Eric, said matter-of-factly as he walked into the kitchen. "What are you studying for?"

"Physics," Brian snorted. "I sometimes wonder why I'm the one named Brian when you're the brain between the two of us," he said almost accusingly. "I'm sure you're done."

"I had my last exam yesterday," Eric said. "I'm officially on my last summer of teenage decadence." The cat continued to meow loudly from outside the kitchen window. "You're right, that cat is damn annoying."

"You should try to study with that as your background noise."

"Why don't you transfer somewhere else?" Eric asked. "Like the living room or something."

"Mom doesn't want me in the living room," Brian told his brother. "She's having guests over tonight and she doesn't want my mess there. It's really hot upstairs." He frowned. "That cat is going to get it from me now." He stood up and made his way outside, shooing the cat from outside the window with a rolled newspaper.

Eric took out the orange juice from the refrigerator and drank from the box's spout. "Cheers, man," he said as his brother walked in, a scowl on his face. He noted that Brian was getting into another one of his bad moods.

"Shut up, Eric," Brian said. "Go away."

Eric, knowing that he was unwanted, slipped quietly outside.

Three of his mother's fine china plates lay broken on the floor. A short distance from it, under the dining table, lay the soup tureen, in five pieces. "A cat got in," Eric's mother explained. "I'm in a hurry, I'm meeting Aunt Lila for breakfast. Anyway, dear, could you please take care of it? I've got to go." His mother gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and rushed out the door.

Brian took out a paper bag and got down on his knees to pick up the ceramic shards. "Like I have a choice." He heard a cat meowing and looked up to see a gray, striped tabby peering at him with its yellow eyes from under the table. He quickly finished picking up the pieces, packing them away into the paper bag which he placed on top of the table. He picked up the cat, which offered no resistance. "You are one fat, annoying bunch of fur," he scolded the cat. Bringing it outside, he let it go on the sidewalk. The cat sat on the pavement, looking up at him and mewing. "You're not cute. Go away." Brian gave the cat a big kick on its behind. "Go away, dammit."

The cat lazily stood up, its yellow eyes flickering at Brian, and went on its way down the street, meowing loudly.

"I hope you get run over by a car!" Brian yelled. He looked around if anyone heard him. Some kids playing hopscotch down the street did, and stared at him like he was from another planet. He shrugged and went inside the house.

"Eric, have you seen my blue fish?" Brian asked, peering into Eric's room. His room looked like a garbage dump compared to Eric's, which was always clean and orderly. "No," Eric said, looking up from the book he was reading. "They could've jumped from the fishbowl again. You might have put in too much water."

"There were no corpses around the fishbowl, Eric," Brian said. "I've actually cleaned my room and there are no fish in my room."

"Must've been an alien abduction," Eric said, poker-faced. He put down his book and stood up. "I'll help you look. I'll be Fox Mulder and you be the frigid girl."

Brian glared at him. They went into his room, which was almost as clean as Eric's. "Whatever happened to the zoo?" Eric joked. He looked at Brian. "Okay, never mind. Let's just look."

After ten minutes, they were disturbed by a meowing from outside Brian's window. On the tree's branch was the gray cat again, with a blue fish tail hanging out of its mouth. "What the..." Eric began.

Brian rushed to the window and grabbed the cat before it could run away. "Aha! I got you. I thought I sent you away already. Why are you back? Huh? And you ate my fish, too. You deserve a punishment. What say you Judge Eric? What's fitting punishment to voluntary fish slaughter and consumption?"

"On two counts we find you guilty, Cat," Eric said. "I sentence you to be tied to a tree somewhere nobody will find you, where you could possibly expire from hunger and exposure."

Brian nodded curtly. "A fitting sentence, your honor."

The two brothers went to the far end of the woods at the edge of a creek a few miles away, which was the only place they could think of that had trees and where nobody would hear the cat's meowing. They tied the cat securely to one of the trees with red leftover Christmas tinsel. Making sure that the cat won't get away, they left it out there for dead.