A cat was eating a dead mouse.
It had matted yellow wet fur and while it ignored of my lasting presence, or more accurately, decided that the meal in front of him was more important than the kid who was 3 times it's size. The mouse, a fair size of an adult hand, and in no way cute, atleast not cute enought to resemble a hamster of anything of sort, laid there with it's head limp, eyes maybe lifeless, maybe a bit more dead than the black pupils of plush toy's behind clear glass, but, when I looked, I figured that my eyes reflected more than whatever sort of light in it's eyes, which is, nothing.
The cat's sharp readied teeth ripped through the outlinear hairy walls seamlessly, like scissors to paper, and begun to carefully pick out the meat and bone.
In hindsight, I shouldn't have been staring in the first place. This was one of the first moments, before my gradual decline of my usually positive self where I had seen something so absurdly wrong, atleast to me at that time, happen right in front of me. I was late to school and standing there watching, seemingly transfixed at the scene before me had brought all my focus and morbid curiosity to that same cat.
He was eating it's breakfast meal for the delicately fine morning and disregarding the fact that I am on the edge of letting out my own breakfast. The quiet snapping of it's jaws and the breaking down of bones into some small mush wasn't unheard of, in fact, the sound echoed ghostly through the sound of the fairly light rain.
The stench was, sadly and unfortunately, strong. It filtered through and the ever existing present before my eyes had myself ingrained into me with how unrealistic it was, and how I, as unused to such encounters like this one.
I had lived on the fairly decent side of town, where the prospect of anything unholy such as this was, at that time, nothing short of nonexistant. At that time, encountering something like this was new, and I had reacted so strongly with hidden fear, maybe not so hidden enough, that looking down at it doing whatever it's doing had my heart beat at a faster pace.
At that time, when I had been walking alone at the far side of town, where the school stood, I had been holding the ugly rainbow coloured umbrella and remembered how I slowly tumbled down to shaking trembling hands and vaguely curious eyes with hidden glittering horror.
Somehow, this wasn't the worst I had seen in my lifetime but this would especially be the most memorable. I was young, and I was lucky that I had a decently running orphanage to live in, one that to a point had been responsible enough to keep the orphan children like me away from the more gruesome scenes of life, and more monstrous.
It was purely coincidence, and while I did blamed the feline in my younger days for having myself dreamt of nightmares of that time, I had myself to blame too. Certainly, I should have went on my way like any sensible person, or any sensible adult who didn't want to have the week to think about it, I was, simply, too curious. You know how children are, they run around and woke you up at mornings like they had all the energy in the world to spend it right then. They laughed at the careful oddities in the world, whatever things they considered too out of place to be considered normal and laughable and not something that is twisted to ring that certain button in your head that makes you go from joyful to a certain silent uncomfortable mess. I, really as a somewhat outgoing person that takes joy when having all the attention directed at me, would have voiced whatever little fickle thing in my mind.
This shouldn't mean anything but just an interesting story to tell for another time. That encounter was just small, short, and purely coincidental to actually mean anything. This by all means, if I had to count the wet shoes and even soggy socks, the very mild depressing weather of that day and maybe the stale Peanut Butter N Jam in my bag, the cigarettes Mike had under his bed those would have meant more to me than this small creature devouring an even smaller being.
Well, that was my own reasoning. Whatever I did said to myself was, at it's entirety, void, because I kept staring. I kept myself grounded at that same specific spot, breathed the irony air and let it swirl inside my lungs, and breathed out again. I watched with careful fascination, without a care in the world actually and the idea of going to school on that day was lost to me. I watched and heard the sounds of every careful little sudden snap, which I could easily compare with splitting a twig in two, and splotchy chewing of the meaty insides.
I liked to think that the only reason I kept watching is because this was the first and only sort of exposure to the real world as I could have get at the small town of Yandele at the west of Texas. Again, we are a fairly small group, and the existence of an orphanage at that time was most probably to encourage adoption and to increase the number of men and women at the small area. If gangs wanted to form here, they would be stomped with the reality of the people at 'Dele having little to nothing, but the joyous life of toys and running the lights with candles and matchsticks. Technology such as mobile smart phones were unheard of and treated as alien as something otherworldly, TVs might as well be a window to another dimension.
Crimes except the occasional theft from a hungry desperate homeless, didn't exist. The idea of murder was in the air, and we weren't the sort of people to ignore something like this in favor of a peaceful life, funerals were held and gravesites were made, but overall this was something new. All in all, I was like a virgin getting laid the first time, overall I was exploring a completely different set of mind. The thing I was looking at was a book to a person who read words but had never read anything.
I think that the only reason that I've thought about that one short experience more than once was because that had impacted so much of my actions after that, it had played a huge role of the change of my entire personality a little while later. I think that experience made me a little less talkative, a little less observing, and a little less of the person I used to be. The memory had ingrained itself as a constant, unforgettable being. It has instilled itself, as the mind numbing entity and ever-existing parasite in my mind, as the memory that drew all of my attention to atleast
Now the thing is, unless you've seen what I've seen at that time, lived in my shoes annd fully lived and breathed the visual and physical horror that had the umbrella I held shook slightly, that made a usually outwardly more talkative self reduced to nothing more but a silent being, you wouldn't have known what I am talking even if I had displayed all my emotions in readable paper cards.
I guessed that it was the least traumatizing thing a child could experienced but as someone who wasn't exposed to much worse things, like the gutters of New York where the druggers live and rot. Later, and eventually, I had come to forget that certain encounter. A little while later, I would have to relfect on that one specific chapter of my life.
I was 8 at that time.