Summary

The story is narrated in the past tense and the first person by an unnamed married woman. She says that she, her husband, and their children moved into a new house after moving out of a highly undesirable former residence. However, in the new house, she and her husband began to notice the dead bodies of large black bugs on the downstairs carpet every morning. The shells of the bugs were usually broken, and other parts of the bugs were usually scattered around the bodies. Sometimes, the bugs would be on their back, their orange underside showing. The woman vacuumed the rug very carefully each morning to completely clean the carpet of all the bug bodies and bug body parts. The woman and her husband believed that the cat must have been killing the bugs, as the cat began to appear ill each night...