12. 20120725: old man, hammer, forest

After Mom died it was just me and Pops, Mom's old man. She died when I was eight. I never knew my father. He knocked her up and died in the war before I was born. At least I had Pops.

The night after Mom's funeral I couldn't sleep. A lot of things kept me from sleeping, but there was only one thing that night that kept me awake.

From the woods behind our house I heard violent sounds of a beast unlike that I had ever heard before. Howling. Thrashing. Thumping. Crashing. Crying. It sounded like someone, or something, was being attacked. Dying.

I huddled under the covers and covered my ears, but it was too late. Those sounds had already imprinted themselves in my mind, and they were all I could think about. Violent images pushed out the thoughts of my dead mother, and for a while I wasn't sad anymore but scared. Of what? I wasn't so sure.

The next day when the sun came out, I went out into the forest to find out what had caused that noise. But unlike my imaginations there was no bloodbath, no heads on sticks, no signs of a satanic ritual.

When I told Pops about it, he got me a dog. He said a boy should have a dog. I named him Max.

Pops quietly passed away at the ripe age of 78, and later that same year Max died. He was fourteen.

The night that Max died I got hammered and buried him in the backyard. While I was finishing up shoveling the dirt over his body something inside me broke.

I swung the shovel around beating the trees with it. I sobbed uncontrollably as I beat my chest. I screamed.

The sounds were as terrible as I remembered them, still vivid in my memory.

I didn't realize until then that the howling that I had heard the night of my mother's funeral were the screams of a man terrorized by grief. They were the cries of a man whose heart was being ripped out of his body. They were the pleas of a man being torn apart without a single soul to protect him, not even his dog.

But contrary to what I had believed that night when I was eight, I learned those sounds weren't of dying but of living.

The sun would rise, tomorrow would come, and I'd still be, here.

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