Bill – Losing his cat

“Hurt, betrayed, angry, confused… I’m not sure when I stopped feeling that, it took me some years to get over it.”

This is Bill, describing his cat, Prince, who was killed.

We always had animals when I was a kid, I was always around dogs, cats. One of them was named Prince and we got him as a kitten, he was still very young, and we named him Prince because he just had a regal attitude, for such a young thing, he just seemed like he was King Shit. He would find the highest object that he was allowed to get on in any given room and sit on it. Prince was a grey, and black, and white tabby pattern with stripes, had the M on the forehead and all that. Kind of generic.

I’m gonna guess, well it was summer time, I’m gonna guess I was about 13, maybe. I think I had been asleep, maybe I was just doing something in my room, but I know I was in my room, my bedroom. It faces the front of the house and I heard some shouting out in the street and some kids were doing something, I go tearing down the stairs, my mom stops me and drags my ass back to my bedroom and locks me in my bedroom and won’t tell me what is going on and now I’m a little confused and a little worried. So I’m just looking out the windows and I can’t figure it out.

It took the rest of the day to get the full story out of my mom. There were these two brothers, the Corey’s, an older one who I was kind of friendly with, to the extent that his father would let me and a younger one. They were both abused, well, they both got welts, I got welts, we kind of compared welts from belts. They tried cornering the cat, I don’t know if they knew it was my cat, if they were doing it deliberately or if they were just kids who hated cats. But they were trying to corner it and I guess they succeeded, and it bit the little Corey brother on the hand. So, he was going “Get that cat.” So, he ended up beating the cat to death with a stick in the gutter, with help from his friends.

I don’t think I really knew what to feel or how to deal with it, I was certainly outraged and shocked, very, very sad. It was just a long of wrongness to it, just feeling like the universe had let me down. Like this sort of wrongness just shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t exist. It was very confusing, I think.

I don’t know if I learned anything from it, other than the fact that the world has broken people in it. It was one of my first introductions to broken people, I suppose, and that is kind of creepy they first time you realize that there are people in the world that don’t really live in the same world that you and I live in. They are really different, you will not be able to relate to them, you will not be able to communicate effectively with them. The first time you run right up against that, it can be pretty scary.

Losing Something by Jody Stephens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

• Category: Losing Something
• Tag: cat, teenager