Stains

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

My father wakes from his nap with a jolt. "Someone answer the damn phone," he yells from his La-Z-Boy, tilted back in full recline.  TV light flickers against his four-day beard, his annoyed expression.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

He cranes his neck back to yell again, but stops, mouth half open, eyes widening further than they had in months.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

Everyone reacts to pools of blood and entrails differently.  Some run, some scream, some do both.  My father? He froze, every muscle and brain cell paralyzed.
He'd later claim that it wasn't fear, but a survival instinct, gifted to his subconscious by ancient ancestors who once stalked through thick forests, spears in hand.

"I was stayin' still so they couldn't see me,' he'd say tersely and the conversation would be considered over without ever establishing exactly who "they" were.

My father wasn't hunting for anything but an excuse.  

We knew this because when we got home we found him in his frozen state and it took us three minutes to get his attention, five to pry his fingers off the remote. Andy and Sammy was starting and we weren't about to miss it over this.  

Why were we unfazed by the blood? Simple. Our remarkably fast rottweiler, Samantha, had taken to chasing neighborhood cats, and the front half of a tabby we found in the kitchen confirmed her success.

"Watch where you step or you'll track it everywhere," our older sister Lisa said, juggling grocery bags as me and Lo hopped around the stains, pretending they were pits of lava.  

"You fell in!"

"No I didn't!"

We eventually made our way to the living room.
It must have been a big cat; the lava was everywhere.

When our father finally acknowledged our presence, he wiped the sweat from his face and began on the survival excuse he would stick to for years to come.  But that first time he told it there was far more stuttering.

We didn't find the rest of the cat until a week later when the laundry room began to smell.  The unmistakable stench of death and decay blooming in the room that represented to us all things clean; our little Holy of Holies, now defiled. Lisa refused to go in there, until our clothes began smelling somehow worse than dead cat.  

Eventually we cleaned it out and our house went back to smelling like stale cigarette smoke, but the fat, orange cat refused to be forgotten.  It continued to haunt our neighborhood for the rest of the month, its unmistakable green eyes staring at us from flyers that someone had posted up and down our street.   

"Missing Cat.
Reward if Found."

We never did call the number listed.  We asked Lisa if we could, begged her for hours on end, claiming that the owners deserved to know the truth, that they should finally have closure.  We were following her around the kitchen stating our case for the hundredth time when our dad shouted from his La-Z-Boy in the other room, "They're not going to give you a reward for a dead cat in two pieces, you know."

"If they do, we'll split it with you!" Lo offered. It was only fair since he had found the other half, lodged behind the dryer.  

"No! You're not calling them!"

Mildly disappointed, we ran out the back door to play in the yard until it was time for dinner.