"Wait a minute -- the cat!"

"Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it -- the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid [sic] and the weeping gardener -- into the house" ("Once upon a Time," 18).

That sentence is so good that I forgive the lack of Oxford comma (which doesn't happen very often). This is my kind of story. Situational irony arguably tops my list of favorite literary devices, and there's plenty of situational irony here I can talk about. About which . . . I can talk. Here we go!

The more this family and their neighbors upped their houses' security systems, the less safe the family and the neighbors actually were. "Under cover of the electronic harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players [what are those?], cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets or patio bars" (12). What gave the intruders this ability? Why, the burglar alarm systems, of course. People were so accustomed to frequent false alarms that intruders could easily break into homes during a frenzy of shrilling alarms.

Then, the family's little boy was reduced to a bleeding mass, and I'm not going to quote that part again. What was the direct cause of the boy's fate? Why, the family's new security wall, of course. Childlike curiosity led the boy into the trap intended not for him but for intruders. Here's a picture of a concentration camp fence, referenced in the story (16):

One of the more obvious situational ironies was the phrase "happily ever after" (9), which unfortunately no longer applied to the family after the story's conclusion.

Needless to say, it was THE CAT: