"Hmmm.?? There's a worse part??" Cheesy interjected. He was still passionately chewing away at his potato while listening to Mother, pieces of it etched into the deep corners of his mouth and his teeth. Sharp slowly turned his head to Cheesy, annoyed at the fact that he could be eating at a time like this, so he nudged him in his side. Cheesy grunted for a minute and turned to him with a vexed face, quickly switching his attention back to Mother.
"So...what happened after that?" Sharp asked tentatively. I sighed, looking down and twisting my fingers between each other nervously, afraid of what was coming next from the tragedy that was my Mother's life.
"Well, I got home and..." She dipped her head and whispered for the Lord to give her strength to relive this nightmare over again.
"After I gathered enough strength to crawl my way home, I saw it. I saw the disaster."
"What happened Ma? Tell us" Cheesy insisted, his eyes popping open.
"My home. Our....home was devastated. Destroyed. The log we lived in was rolled down the hill and broken up into pieces. But you see, it was a huge log. We thought that it would be impossible to move but we were cocky... Whoever it was...did move it" her eyes dialed back and forth. She stared out into space until she was ready to talk again. Then her eyes switched back to us.
"The first rodent I saw was Simsy. Well, his head was what I saw. The lower part of his body was in another place" immediately as she said that Cheesy started choking on his food, throwing the potato he had in his hand back on his plate. He leaned over and started coughing continuously, Sharp having to beat his back until he calmed down.
"I met Buck Buck's body sprawled out in the middle of the log, and I still can't forget the empty, cold look in his dead eyes till that day. He died with them open, looking up at the sky. The demons ate out his mid-section. I mean his stomach was- well.... the part where his stomach should be was..was empty. It was just a hole, of organs an- and blood an bones"." Mother stood up, gesturing her hands at her stomach area.
"Ripped, discarded legs, paws. Strings of intestines laying across, here and there. That was everywhere really"
"Eyeballs, kidneys, necks, ears....blood. There was so much of it, everywhere just body parts scattered across the floor...i was walking through rivers of blood. It was just-" She bowed her head and let her hand fall on the table, closing her eyes and taking a few minutes to recuperate. The room went silent again.
Sharp, Cheesy and I exchanged saddened looks while Mother kept her head down. I had mixed emotions about this whole thing, but I was still so unsure.
Mother did this every time she even thought of us going outside. Each story was scarier than the next, and I suspected that she was vouching on the scare factor to instill fear into us, so that we would never want to go outside.
It damn sure was a successful tactic because it worked on Sharp and Cheesy. They never asked about outside, they never talked about it to me, it wasn't even a topic that existed to them.
But she realized no matter how much she scared us; she couldn't scare me enough. So what if they were dangerous things out there? Life is full of challenges that way. You know what really terrified me? The thought of having to stay in one place, for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, if she had really gone through such an ordeal, I felt guilty for having her feel prompted to re live this traumatic experience from her past. I loved my Mother dearly, and I didn't want her to suffer or struggle. Past or present.
She brought her head back up, rubbing her nose in between sniffles. Her normally bulb shaped eyes were downcast, glossy, like marbles that had just been polished.
"The only person left alive was Uncle Buck. He was laid up against the log, vomiting blood out of his mouth. An- "she closed her eyes again, gripping the table and folding her lip as she tried to start again.
"So I said to him Uncle Buck???Wa- What happened???Who did this??? Where's Aunty Ann??? An- and he said. He said-" tears splashed against the table as she opened her eyes, her hands gestured out into midair as if she was trying to hold an invisible box.
"I tried to help him up so we could go but I couldn't. He couldn't move, he was injured real bad. I looked an- an I saw that his. His-..." She let out a grunt trying to describe what she saw.
"There was a huge chunk of his left side gone, just gone. It was bitten into like a damned apple. He told me it's too late for him. He said it's too late. Just go, run he said. Run before the foxes come back-"Mother got up from the chair and towered over us now, hands shaking, lips trembling.
I looked down at the wooden table in front of us and continued playing with my fingers, feeling guilty for having brought up the question.
"So I got up, I turned away to run and as- as I d-did that I saw something. I saw something sons, from the corner of my eyes-" Mother's eyes widened as she looked at us, her voice heightened. She gripped my wrist with one hand, and gripped Sharp's wrist with the other.
"It was Aunty Ann. Aunty Ann she....she was. There!! But she was. She was-"her voice had softened now, and she let go of our hands, rising hers up to the ceiling.
"She was in between the teeth of that vicious, murderous fox!!" her voice took on a deeper, angry tone while she shook her hands in the air, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Those blood thirsty, greedy, bush tailed.... killers!! Raided my home. Took my family..."
"The only thing I could do that day was run. Just run, run away...i couldn't even give them a chance at a proper burial. From that day forward, my life became so difficult. I'd find new rodents like me, I'd join a new burrow with a few of them here and there, but the same thing kept happening over and over again."
''Whether it was a fox, a wild boar, eagles, cats, falcons, dogs, they just. Found us and hunted us down. They'd raid our homes and kill us off in groups, I was lucky to have escaped a few ambushes, else none of us would be here today. And it was much harder now that I started to have partners. And give birth to pups...'' she paused, staring out into space.
"Do you know how difficult it is to have to run with children by your side???I've given birth to soo many. And I lost them all to ravenous, hungry fiends!! Fiends, the whole lot of them!!!" Mother flung her head down on the table, sobbing uncontrollably while she stomped her hands angrily against the wooden surface, the plates shaking as she did.
"Mother.." I whispered lowly, the guilt tugged at my insides even more fervently.