“THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP”

            That’s what the rabbit’s heart sounded like right before I killed it.  I had it strapped down to the table, one of those metal that I poked holes in to look like those you see on television shows about crime scenes.  Under the head of the table, I had put two regular bricks on top of the cinder blocks to give it a little tilt to the other end.  This made an incline so the blood ran down to the drain hole.  I kept a bucket under the hole so I didn’t get the shop floor all messed up with blood.

            Uncle Aaron wouldn’t have liked to see the shop floor nasty.  Up until the day he died, this shop was his pride and joy.  He kept it neat and orderly, just the way he liked everything in his life.  That’s what he expected from Aunt Beverly, and that’s what he expected of me after I came to live with them.

            “Thump, thump, thump, thump…thump…thump…”

            That’s the way Aunt Beverly’s heart sounded when I laid her up on my table.  She seemed a little upset at first, but then she settled down and just seemed to accept that it was all going to be over soon.  I think the look in her eyes is what I’ll probably remember most about her passing.  She always looked vacant, like her mind was trying to focus on the world around her, but it just wasn’t clicking together right.  It was like the pieces of her life had all been thrown together in a big box when she was born, and the older she got, the more she realized pieces were missing.

            Since she and Uncle Aaron never had any kids of their own, I thought maybe the courts giving them custody of me would be a good thing.  After I’d been with them about a year, I thought perhaps I was going to turn out to be one of those pieces missing from Aunt Beverly’s life.  Maybe I would have been if she hadn’t found the kittens in my treehouse.

            I spent a whole summer building that treehouse out of scrap lumber and was darn proud of the rickety thing.  It was where I went to be by myself, to do the things that I dreamed about—the things I dreamed when I was asleep and the ones I imagined when I was awake. 

The gym teacher tried to talk about a young boy’s “special needs” as he’s growing up but said we shouldn’t give in to the temptation of our weak flesh.   I didn’t give in—that’s one thing I never did.  If I could have talked to Uncle Aaron about stuff like that, I think he would have been proud of me for upholding Scripture on that point.  I don’t know how he’d have felt about the other things I did, like skinning the kittens while they were still alive or cutting out their still-beating hearts and eating them.

            Considering he didn’t seem to like it too much when I did it to him, I think he probably wouldn’t consider that a high point on his list of things I did that made him proud.