Chapter Six

There is a darkness in all of us, struggling to project itself onto the screen of our minds. But for five troubled teens, that darkness will project itself in a new form. The hate, mania, and sadism have chosen a new vessel. That vessel is a taxidermy

Mackenzie cooper: chapter six

 

I was looking through my old bookshelf that night, after my homework was done and my mom lectured me about being neat.  She wasn’t angry or anything, just disappointed, which was a hundred times worse in my opinion.  I ran my finger across a few Nancy drew books that I never read, and passed over my babysitter’s club collection, books 1-59, with about ten Goosebumps books thrown in to shake things up.  I honestly hadn’t bought a book since sixth grade, finding the library to be much more practical. 

 

But between Nancy drew and the case of the missing locket and Night of the living dummy was a little red book with plastic sheet protectors as pages.  An old photo album.

 

I pulled it from the tightly packed shelf and opened it up.  In the beginning were pictures of me and my cousin Sandy when we were babies, and a few of my mom’s X boyfriend’s son, who was holding a very small, very pink me on a couch and smiling up at the camera. 

 

There were two from my pre-k graduation where I had a stupid little cap on my head and was holding a mass printed diploma with my name sharpied onto it and I was looking as if I’d just won a presidential election. 

 

And then there was a Polaroid snapshot of me and mike at his 5^th birthday party, the day we’d met.  His mom was new to the neighborhood, and worked at my mom’s office.  In kindergarten she’d brought me to “bring your kid to work day”, which became “put your kid in the break room and pray that they don’t burn themselves on the coffee machine” day. 

 

Mrs. Donau gave me an invite to her son’s fifth birthday.  She was new to the town, and new to the office.  Her son wasn’t yet enrolled in the school, so didn’t have many friends.  It was all irrelevant to me though, a party was a party. 

 

In my head, I could still see the decorations.  Green and blue streamers were strewn across the back yard, and there were balloons on most of the chairs, although some only had the wilted rubber remains drooped over the armrest.  A few kids who I recognized from my mom’s office were throwing sand from the sandbox at one another.  A few more were taking blind swings at a balloon that had become entangled in the metal of the monkey bars on his swing set. 

 

A third cluster had formed in the far corner of the yard.  About five kids were gathered around something.  Some of them were thrusting sticks into the middle of the circle.  I walked over to check out what it was.  The five had gathered around a baby bird. 

 

The bird was small, and brownish gray.  It wasn’t dead, but it had fallen from the nest and was too small to fly.  A little redhead in pigtails was poking the tiny critter with a long stick, giggling as it chirped in distress.  I could feel from the noise the animal made that the poking was causing it pain.  Its wing was hanging funny, and its leg looked mangled. 

 

It propped itself up on the dead wing and flapped franticly with the good one, thrashing around and kicking it’s un-mangled leg, toes outstretched toward freedom.  The girl poked it again, and was joined by a little boy with a black baseball cap.  Behind me, mixed with the noise of the screeching bird, a balloon burst. 

 

The noise was gone after less than a second, but it hung in my ears and became stale, twisting with the screeches of the bird like a vine wraps around a tree.  The hellish noise was melted into the innocent laughter of the children as they tormented the helpless animal.  And then for the grand finale, the blended goop of a noise stuck to the screech that came out of my throat.

 

“Stop!” I pushed the red haired girl onto the grass, and shoved the little boy down next to her.  A boy who looked like the girl’s brother went to shove me, but I was possessed by my rescue mission.  He tripped over me and fell atop his sister, kneeing her in the mouth.  An ivory colored baby tooth fell from between the redhead’s lips.  Blood spread over them like lip gloss, turning them a five-dollar w***e red.  She screeched bloody murder, sending sprays of red spittle over her yellow summer dress. 

 

In the moment of confusion, I saw my chance.  I scooped the helpless baby animal into my arms and ran into the house with it.  The adults were all running to help the girl, as if a single knocked out tooth was a fatal car crash.  I thudded up the stairs of the strange home and into the room of the child who’s party it was.  And sitting on his bed was the birthday boy, putting on a new pair of pants.  The old pair was cast aside and kicked under the bed, a red smear of pizza sauce coating the left leg. 

 

We both looked at each other in a silence that was only broken by the rhythmic shouts of the distraught bird.  He got up and examined the critter, then pet its head with his index finger, as if he were the bird’s mother, and I was its nest.  He scooped it up from my hands and placed it on his pillow.

 

“got a worm?” he asked.  I shook my head.

“go get a worm, he looks hungry”.

 

The task wasn’t hard.  It’s just rained that morning, so many of them were freshly surfaced under rocks.  I was successful on my first try.  The worm struggled and thrashed for it’s life, secreting a slippery goop that reminded me of liquid soap.  Everybody was still gathered around the sobbing girl, trying to calm her. 

 

I rushed back up the stairs with my prize in my hand, dangling it around as if it were a snake.  He placed the worm on his pillow in front of the bird, then turned his head to the side, staring deeply into the black dolly eyes of the bird and nodding.  He lifted the worm from the pillow and popped it in his mouth, chewing it like hard ten cent Bazooka bubblegum.  His face contorted along with mine and he ground the bug into paste with his newly grown big boy teeth.  He opened his mouth and scraped the remains of the worm from his tongue, using his pinky nail to dig out pieces caught in his teeth.  Bit by bit, he fed the worm to the birdie, clearly a devoted father.  His grey eyes sparkled with pride as the animal took his offering.

 

“you gotta chew it up first” he explained to me “If you don’t, the baby cant swallow it.” He patted the bird in the top of it’s head again.  A piece of chewed worm hung on his lip, slowly sliding down to his chin. 

 

“Wanna see what my momma got me for my birthday?” he reached under his bed and pulled out a shining, oversized hardcover copy of where in the world is Waldo and opened it up, sitting on his wooden toy chest at the edge of his bed.  He flipped to an underwater scene full of red and white plants and pinstriped fish, scooting over to make room for me.  We didn’t even know each other’s name, but I sat down beside him and we were suddenly the best of friends.  We sat on the toy chest, exploring strange and alien lands in search of a small man dressed all in red and white until his mother called us to come outside for party games.

 

His mother had given me the copy of Where in The World is Waldo, along with an assortment of toys and picture books after the murder, before she moved away.  She didn’t want anything to remember him by.  And it wasn’t until she’d placed the worn, dog-eared, Pepsi and finger paint stained book in my shaking hands that Mike was really dead. 

 

That night, right after the funeral, I put the toys and books under my bed and never looked at them again.  Playing with them, reading them, it would all be a constant reminder.  I just couldn’t run it through my head how somebody could take the life of another human, let alone the life of a little child.  An innocent child who never even had the chance to think an evil thought.  Even worse was the fact that hardly anybody could remember him.  Because they all forced themselves to forget, because they didn’t understand it either.

 

I ran my fingers along the picture, studying it.  He’d taken the picture that day with his new Polaroid camera.  It was a big, clunky thing.  But it was magic, because the little box started out grey, slowly morphing into faces and places and things that you wanted to remember.  Pictures always stayed as you wanted to remember them. 

 

I was in my little pink party dress, my hair cropped to the bottom of my chin with a matching pink bow that stood out powerfully against my jet black hair.  I had icing all over the collar of my dress and smeared across my face, a small puff of it stuck in my hair.  And there was mike next to me, his arm around me like we’d known each other since birth, with an equal amount of icing in his hair, smeared on his clothes, and dotting his cheeks along with his freckles.  The exposure from the camera turned his deep blue eyes a piercing red, and made his dirty blonde hair an albino white. 

 

Next to the picture was one of the baby bird, the worm offering half eaten by the sickly critter, who was placed in a shoebox that had been filled with toilette paper and cotton balls.  We placed it under the bed after singing “hush-a-bye baby” to it and kissing it on the head. 

 

The next picture was one that had been given to me with the toys, one that he’d taken without me.  The baby bird was laid in a hole in the sandbox, cold and dead.  He’d buried the creature in the sandbox and carved “RIP” with in the wooden boarder his father’s pocketknife.  We never played in the sandbox after that day, Mike always said that it was bad to disturb “hollow” ground.  And in that “hollowed” sandbox we buried anything dead that we’d ever gotten our hands on, and any pet that had ever passed away.  In that box we’d laid to rest seven goldfish, five flat squirrels, one cat-battered snake, two drown rats and one cat named Humphrey who’d been shot by an older boy with a BB gun. 

 

We used to hold funeral services and read from the bible over the graves, and pick flowers for the pet cemetery.  The next few pages were pictures from the services, right down to a shot of all of his stuffed animals draped with black bath towels and playing the part of the mourners.  We’d take turns playing the parts.  When he was the priest, I’d be the grieving mother sobbing at the foot of the grave and wearing a black bandanna over my face like a veil.  When it was my turn to be the priest, he would be the stone-faced father trying to be strong for the sake of his teddy bear daughter who missed her brother more than anything in the world.

 

  I always thought he’d grow up to direct funerals.  And I knew, as I watched his box being lowered into the ground that he would have much rather been put into the pet cemetery and go to animal heaven with all of the critters who’s souls he’d laid to rest.  He would have looked so much better among the cold, mangled animals with whom he now shared an appearance than in a field full of old people and those who’d died of illness.  His coffin was too small for the big, crowded field.

 

I wondered if the animals had rushed to meat him at the gates of heaven, if the creatures had sainted him for opening the gates, for giving them a spot on sacred earth to forever rest without being picked clean by crows.  I wondered if Humphrey had purred in thanks for mike’s valiant efforts to nurse him back to health as he bled. 

 

Mike had cried so hard that day and he tried to apply pressure to the cats wound, even after his father, a vet, had informed him that a cat with such a nasty gut wound couldn’t be helped.  He’d taken his shirt off in the middle of the yard and wrapped it around the animal, desperately trying to cut off the blood flow and soaking his jeans with sticky brown-red until all of the warmth had left that cat’s body and it’s choppy breathing stopped.

 

And I can remember how he’d flipped the bird at Aaron Wroth for shooting the animal, and how he’d cried just as hard as old Mrs. Winston did when he went to return the cats body, and ask for permission to burry it.  I just wish he’d been alive to see Aaron Wroth put away for life on charges of murder.  The violence for him didn’t end with an animal, it rarely does. 

 

It made me sick to imaging another child in his house, desecrating the cemetery and digging up the bones like a demented paleontologist.  Our bones.  From our animals.  Even at fourteen years old, it still made my ears hot with anger. 

 

I flipped on my Tv to calm myself down.  I came to a station that played old cartoons, and fixed my eyes on Tom and Jerry.  The grey cat was casing the mouse around a kitchen, meeting grisly destruction as a dynamite loaded cake was handed to him.  But after the explosion there was no blood, no death, so screams of pain.  Only a very surprised looking cat covered with soot and blackened frosting. 

 

The cat was unharmed, shaking off the debris and going back to the chase, hell-bent to destroying the cute little mouse, who was throwing kitchen knives and porcelain plates at the cat.  It was a never-ending cycle of destruction and recovery, just like in real life.  Only in real life, recovery was a lot harder than shaking off the soot and continuing the chase. 

 

Author's Note

Please tell me what you think.