Template:Featured Article/03 2011

Walter Paisley is a simple-minded busboy and aspiring artist employed by a trendy beatnik café known as The Yellow Door. Amiable and soft-hearted, Walter admires the various painters and poets who frequent the establishment, in particular, a poet named Maxwell H. Brock. Walter is also secretly in love with one of the clubs patrons, a young woman named Carla. Unfortunately, Walter is largely ignored by the club's regulars and doesn't even receive any respect from Leonard de Santis, owner of The Yellow Door.

After a night of work, Walter returns to this apartment. His landlady Mrs. Swickert asks Walter if he has seen her missing cat, to which Walter responds, "No". Inside his apartment, he hears the sound of the cat scratching about inside the walls. He has no idea how the animal managed to get behind the plaster, but he tries to free him by cutting away a section of the wall. Unfortunately, when Walter plunges his knife into the wall, he accidentally stabs the cat, killing it. He is too frightened to tell Mrs. Swickert the harrowing news about her pet. Instead, Walter decides to incorporate the dead animal into his artwork. He encases the cat, as well as the knife still sticking through its body, in a thin layer of modeling clay.

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