"The squirrels were our cousins in rodency, they were always very hospitable to us, giving us nuts and dinning us in those tree trunks they inhabited. The lizards and the bigger lizards we gave food, and they treated us with the same mutual respect. We used to jump on the backs of frogs, and they would carry us across the pond. They liked us to, the frogs. We would catch grasshoppers and give it to them for food, and they would allow us to sit their backs to carry us cross the ponds and the rivers. We would race to see which frog could get us across the pond the fastest, on days where the stream was light of course. All of us had so much fun" as she spoke, the light coming in through the peephole hit her eyes and they began to glisten.
"It was the best days of my life those times. I was surrounded by Family and Friends that had some of the best intentions for me. Whether they were the same species as me or not, never really mattered. They meant no harm. Our lives were carefree. We were surrounded by food, great experiences, and most importantly, the love that we had for each other was limitless" her voice was soft and whispery now. I had expected her to yell at me when I brought this up, to disregard what I was saying and casting it off as foolishness, but so far, she had done no such thing.
Her eyes weren't hardened anymore. They twinkled like those stars I saw in the sky at night, saturated with so much love and adoration, and it spread to the rest of us, we felt that deeply as she talked about it.
"Yes, my sons, your mother was once young and in love with Life. I was unstoppable! Nothing in the world ever got me down. I loved to laugh. I loved to have a great time. I believed in enjoying life now, right now as it stood in front of me. But life hadn't always been so loving..."
Immediately after she said that her expression changed. I watched all the love and admiration she had previously seep out of her being, her eyes reverted to being slits, and now they were familiar again, filled with suspicion and worry. The holes were returning over her hunched eyebrows and as she bent over, she rubbed her eyes across her arm. Her eyes were dry now. Devoid of any glimmers.
Something in the walls of my gut moved. I had a feeling that her story was about to take a turn for the worst...
"Life stopped loving me like it used to. I suppose it became jealous at the amount of carefreeness I had, or I simply ran out of time." She straightened up in her chair, looking straight at us.
"One day Peaches and I went to raid the peach tree at noon, around the same time as we usually did. The sun was at a lower angle now and it wasn't so hot, but we had climbed up into that tree at that time of the day about a thousand times, and no harm came of it. Little did we know that that was the exact time that birds of prey used to search for food for themselves and their babies"
Sharp took his hands out of his lap and folded his arms, that being the first time he had moved since Mother started to speak. Cheesy had been doing the same thing, mindlessly chewing on a piece of potato, whilst listening to Mother's story.
"We moved from limb to limb of that tree, just hogging all those juicy peaches away without a thought. From one branch to the next, up and above, higher. Peaches and I saw one of the biggest Peaches we had ever seen hanging loosely from the top, and we trudged up there for it." I found myself crouching forward even more, wholly intrigued by this story. Mother told us stories about her Family all the time, but she never mentioned Peaches.
"It was the two of us on that limb. We got no noise, no lil wiff of danger, nothing. Soon as Peaches and I climbed up and tried to drag that Peach off of the branch so it could fall to the ground, an eagle three times the size of this room swopped in and grabbed her, knocking me off the limb in the process. I spiraled downwards. I got panged up so hard falling off those limbs..I still have the scars to prove it" Suddenly she got up from across us and turned her back to us, shuffling her hands in the fur to the back of her head and moving them apart.
Her hands had managed to part away enough hair to reveal a horrendous, vertical, misshaped scar, that nearly stretched from one ear to the next. All three of us bent forward over the table, eyes lasered on the scar.
"Wooooww..." Cheesy dropped the potato he was eating from his hand while he watched; Sharp covering his mouth. I stood there, wondering how I had never managed to see that scar on her before. I had been living with her all my life and I had never seen that, at all.
"How is this possible? " I mouthed silently to myself. Then it hit me.
She always kept the hair in the back of her head long. Everywhere else she knitted down and groomed on her body, but I have never seen Mother wet her paw and stroke the back of her head....This must have been why..
"Almost busted the back of my head open. Thank goodness I had clambered into a branch before I fell more." She turned around and sat down again, continuing her story.
"I hid myself in a hole of that tree..in and out of unconsciousness with a bloody head and bruised body, watching two Eagles share Peaches as they perched on the branch of a neighboring apple tree. I can still see it like it happened yesterday..." She broke eye contact with us and looked down, focusing on her fidgety hands. Her fingers were tightly interloped in each other.
"They thrashed that girl around like she was nothing but a meal. They ripped her head off, peeled off her skin from her body and picked her insides apart. I smell it still, the rawness of the blood. How red it looked on their beaks. They tore her in half and slurped her intestines down in the back of their throats like it was spaghetti, ripped the flesh off her ribs. Both of them, just back and forth, tugging away at her until she was nothing but bones. Nothing but Blood and bones.... I had never seen anything like that...and that wasn't even the worst part"