Cat Heads

Life has been pretty horrible, lately. I had good job, was making decent money then I fucked it up. Fucked it way the fuck up.

I lost my shit and just freaked. Wish I'd done things different, but I didn't. I just didn't.

Got on Craigslist and found a place to live. I'm beyond middle aged, but here I am living like a college student. Sharing a place with three roommates I don't even know. Small bedroom I cancall my own. Life could be better.

So I'm pretty much living on campus. This would be cool if I were eighteen, but I'm not. It's embarrassing and pathetic and not at all the way I wished things ended up, but they did anyway.

How do I deal with this? I drink. I go to the corner store and buy a 40 ounce King Cobra malt liquor. It's pretty ghetto for a skinny white man like myself, but it does the job.

I've found the quickest way to get to the corner store is to take the alleys. I go down the back fire escape and it puts me out into the alley behind the main street. I follow it across several blocks and it puts me right beside the dot-in-the-head as opposed to woo-woo Indian convenience store. I can get me some drinky-drinky there.

But the other day I was walking down the alley and saw this: Every few feet there's a big, round

trash container; some kind of extruded plastic grey polymer thing that looks the same all up and down the block. I saw this one, though, that had the corner of a Zip-lock bag hanging out from between the big plastic lid.

Understand, depspite my poverty, I am not a trash-picker. I do not usually rummage through garbage bins. But somehow, the corner of that plastic bag hanging out of the big waste dump called to me. Maybe I'm just nosy.

I pulled it out. Inside the Zip-Lock bag were six severed cat heads. They weren't even cats; they were kittens.

I vomited.

The thing was this: The trash bin was behind an apartment building---three units upstairs, three units below. Whoever did this, I had no way of knowing.

I didn't want to eat or drink or anything anymore.

On the other side of the alley there are some thick bushes. So I kind of hid behind there and waited. A woman came out and threw her stuff in the trash. I watched her go back in and pawed through the garbage: Ramen noodle wrappers, soup cans, mac and cheeese boxes.

I heard a horrible sound. Cats mewing but all of a sudden they shut the fuck up.

Fat red-haired guy came out and threw something away. I fished it out of the trash. Six severed kitten heads in a plastic bag.

Got a letter in the mail. No return address: "Stop watching me."