Cat’s Milk
A short story by
M. Strain Jr.
Copyright 2015 M. Strain Jr.
[email protected] _____
This story is free to the public and therefore should never be sold without the author’s consent. So if you’re the poor soul who actually paid money for this crap, you might want to demand a refund. Please feel free to share this with your friends, family, and even that creepy guy peeking in your window, as long as it remains in its complete and original form. Please keep in mind, however, that the author still maintains all rights over the content of this story, including the title, characters, and situations. In other words, if M. Strain Jr. or any of his Italian family finds this work published elsewhere or turned into a lousy movie without his written and signed consent (as well as some cash), the offenders should at the very least expect a lawsuit to follow.
This is a work of fiction. Despite the possibility of any character seeming oddly familiar to you, be assured that although the characters and situations are inspired by real people in my life, they do not represent actual people or their actions.
Stay up-to-date on everything M. Strain Jr. at
https://www.mstrainjr.com
(assuming that my website stays up to date)
Hello, my name is Aaron.
I’m just your average guy from your average rural town, another face in a vast sea of people who all think they’re different but are in fact all the same. Yep, I’ve found it doesn’t matter how you dress, think, or act; you fit into a broad category just like everyone else—nerds, bullies, queers, Goths, suits, conservatives, liberals, men, women, black, white. It’s hard being radical when there are so many like you.
Now of course we always have our exceptions to the rule, those who are so beyond the norm that there’s no category to put them in--except maybe with the loonies. The outsiders. The ones so dissimilar from the rest of us that they can’t function in society. For me, that exception is centered upon one very special woman in my life, and “loony” doesn’t even begin to describe the start of her.
And no, I’m not talking about my wife. Never had one; never wanted one. Don’t give a damn about the whole marriage scene: two young and naïve lovers, crotches afire, dreaming of long walks on the beach, passionate sex all day every day, growing old together, finally dying in each other’s arms at their Florida oceanside condo….
In reality, marriage these days seems to be for the couple’s parents, who hold firm to the antiquated idea that their children should abstain from sex until holy matrimony. What both sets of parents (and even the groom) don’t realize is that the bride in white used to frequent the local middle-of-nowhere liquor shack from the time she was fourteen. She’d drink herself into a catatonic state and be little more than a limp blowup doll, an open-mouthed sex toy for all the drunken, filthy men of the town to feel her up and penetrate every orifice of her body. And let us not forget that as she stands at the front of the church in the sight of God, looking deep into her man’s eyes, she’s knocked up with another man’s baby. Again. See, she’s secretly had several abortions through her teenage years. Don’t worry though; she’ll tell her new husband about the pregnancy after the honeymoon and maybe he’ll think it’s his.
With the birth of the bastard child, named Aaron (go figure), mommy and daddy reach the world-shattering conclusion that their jobs at McDonalds and Dairy Queen can’t possibly pay the myriad of bills from all those heartless companies that seem to enjoy making young people suffer under their greedy oppression. Dad, the ever-loving coward, bails out and leaves mother to care for her son. He had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t his anyway. It probably had something to do with how he was the sort of good Christian boy who always used a condom and only entered the rear hatch, you know, so that he might save his bride’s deflowering until their wedding night.
Now there were multiple reasons why my dad felt the urge to pack up and leave our lives, and the lack of money definitely played a part in it, but I think the principal motivo for his departure had something more to do with the women in the family. Sure, they seemed normal to the public eye. My grandmother was known in her community for her special brownies, and all the young punks liked them. Mother got along just fine with the other women at the local laundromat, as long as they gossiped about the sins of everyone else. But those people didn’t know. The ignorant morons. They had no idea of the darkness creeping just below the fake smiles and tittering laughs.
It was a passion. An obsession. A cult-like fetish of pure dementia.
I was a junior in high school when, upon returning home one afternoon, my mom told me some exciting news: Prissy had her litter. One of our thirteen cats, Prissy was an orange and white tabby who got fucked in a cage and birthed four new kittens. Why would your mother be so thrilled that three of them were females? She wouldn’t care, you say? Well mine did. She came over to me, cupped the back of my head in a hand, and while scratching my skull with her long homegrown fingernails, she said, “Just think, baby. Soon we’ll be harvesting their milk too, just like their mommy!”
Yes indeed, you read that right. She milked cat nipples. Collected the precious creamy liquid in glass jars to store in the refrigerator. You see, the purpose of our little household cat farm was that my mother, and her mother, and her mother before her all drank cat’s milk.
How far back does this unholy tradition go? Well I know for a fact that my dear grandmother guzzled it all the time. Had a glass of it in her hand just about every time I saw her. From before her there were vague stories passed to me from my mom, but a little digging into our town’s history revealed mysterious gatherings held under the streets of the 18th century. The local authorities responded to calls of muffled meowing and soft sucking sounds in the night. The few who were discovered and apprehended were either burned alive with their pets or hung. But others escaped and were never caught. Some people have witches in their family history; it seems I have cat milkers.
Grandma told me once that the milk from a cat tastes like fishy walnuts. Good for your pelvis, she used to say. The poor woman. She met an unfortunate end when she allegedly slipped and toppled into our running wood-chipper. Helped our tomatoes though, God bless her. My mom was terrified after the accident that she would be blamed for her death; grandma had just finished her will, after all. So she took to spreading the old woman’s shredded remains over her precious tomato garden, her greatest obsession besides cat’s milk. And as it turns out, grandma was an excellent fertilizer.
This was around the start of May last year, and this is when the status quo lunacy began to escalate even further.
Shortly after I had spread my wings and left the cobras’s nest, she planted a little garden as a stress-relieving project to work on between the two part-time jobs she would toil under until the day she finally went to that place in the sky where Jesus and Elvis play chess together and muse over the ironies of life. Mother loved tomatoes, especially if they were diced and floating in a bowl of warm cat’s milk, but she couldn’t get the damn things to grow. She tried just about everything, putting more money into her garden than she ever invested in me. Still, her patch of chemicalized dirt remained a patch of dirt.
But after grandma died and mother sprinkled her flesh and bone over the stubborn tomato seedlings like smoked mozzarella in a New York delicatessen, the plants sprang up within the week. Not long after though, the tiny vines began to shrivel, and mother decided she needed more fertilizer.
Did I tell you that she hated to fail? No I forgot that. Let me explain so maybe you can get some of it.
When she was a little girl, going to the same elementary school I later went to, she had once stabbed the po
or boy next to her with filed-down safety scissors. And what was his crime against her? Nothing! She was enraged because she couldn’t keep her damn crayon inside the lines of a picture she was drawing. At least, that’s what Mrs. Thompson, the oldest teacher at West Junction, had told me when I was in her third-grade class. I think she expected the same from me, but I was always a quiet kid. You must understand I didn’t want to share much about my life.
Anyway, mom soon became a vegetarian, throwing any meat from the house into the tomato garden. She would buy whole chickens and packages of sausage and pork loin only to shred and sacrifice the raw, bleeding flesh to her carnivorous gods of soil and fruit. And then, when her stash of grandma’s drug money depleted, the cats began to vanish.
At the time I moved out to support myself with a part-time job in retail, I was nineteen and we had twenty-three cats. My mother’s house had become a small milk farm. She was on her way to becoming like grandma, whose cats had numbered as much as forty-six. And just like her mother’s, my mom’s home acquired that same pleasant odor of cat food, kitty litter, and shit. A normal person cannot imagine what it’s like to enter a single-wide trailer with over twenty meowing cats climbing all over its furniture and crapping on the rug because the single litter box in the kitchen was packed with hard piss. I swear that stuff was almost hard enough to replace my apartment’s crumbling foundation.
At least grandma had a three-story place. I remember how the bars over the windows made it look like an insane asylum. It was condemned after her unfortunate death, and later someone took it upon himself to burn the place down. Sadly, some of her cats were still inside as the flames licked away at the half-collapsed structure and everything within. Even now as I write this, I can hear the horrible shrieks as their small, furry lives came to a tragic end. May their souls rest in peace.
I stopped in for a visit one day and learned that Prissy had died. Not only her, but also all of the older cats in the house… the ones that could no longer mate or be milked. Being the normal one in the family, I found this to be coincidentally strange. “Come see my garden,” urged mother, so I followed her to the backyard. The tomato patch that had started as a three foot square had now matured into a rectangle twelve by fifteen feet. Instantly the noxious smell of rot filled my nostrils and it took all that was in me not to toss up my fast food breakfast right there. But then my eyes lowered to the discolored ground buzzing with flies, and what I saw there stopped my heart cold. My toes curled inside my sneakers and my lungs caught in my throat as I opened my mouth in a silent scream. To this day, I am fairly certain that my face in that moment looked something similar to those six rotting faces, frozen in eternal terror, starting back at me with hollow feline eyes squirming with hundreds of maggots.
Over the next few months, random pets in the surrounding area started to disappear. Cages were opened, leashes were cut, and the animals were never found. LOST PET posters competed for space on the telephone poles in town. Try as they might, the local police were at a loss in helping all of the distressed families. But I knew where they had all gone. They were snatched up by my cat burglar mother to satiate her thriving red orbs of bittersweet fruit.
One bright morning, little Becca Floyd left her house to knock on neighbors’ doors so that she might use her sparking blue eyes to deviously pressure the free peoples of the rural community into buying multiple boxes of her cookies from the fiendish Girl Scouts of America.
She never returned home.
Days later, a state AMBER Alert commenced and a county-wide search shortly followed. Little Becca Floyd was never seen again.
However, while taking out the trash for my mother on one evening visit, my gaze affixed to a crumpled green sash in her curbside dumpster, a sash decorated with an impressive number of badges.
Adrenaline racing through my veins, sweat tingling the nape of my neck, I stormed into the house and waved the article of vile scout-wear in her face as she was eating. Her sudden shock freed a mint cookie from her hand and it fell to the plate with a light clank.
“What is this?” I screamed in her face. “What did you do?”
Her body, at first alarmed, melted before me into a slumped pitiful state. She buried her face in her chocolate-covered hands and began a wailing sob as her meaty shoulders shuddered and bounced.
“This is sick!” I said, pacing furiously back and forth. A truckload of thoughts collided in my head at once and tangled into an incoherent ball of mental yarn. What could I say? What could I do? I couldn’t just let this go and pretend it didn’t happen!
The words came out of my mouth before I had time to ponder them.
“I’m going to the police. You-- You need help!”
The finality of my words hit me in the brain like a sack of flour. I was threating my mother with a possible life sentence! At first I wavered, thinking to recant my words of betrayal, but my heart became firm against me and I knew it was the only thing to do.
She looked up at me, two dark wells of tears running over, her face as red as one of her demonic spherical babies. I wanted to feel sorry for her; I wanted to give in. But I couldn’t. Phone in hand, I turned to step outside and call the cops on my mother, the conflict within me tugging my heart in different directions.
Had I seen in her eyes what was forming there, had I seen that last thread of her sanity unravel, I would have never turned away from her.
Leaping from her seat, she dashed to the kitchen counter and clasped her chubby fingers around a steak knife. She lunged at me with the cry of a banshee, raising the knife behind her head and bringing it down with all her weight. The only thing that saved me that day was all those paranoid years of being chased by bullies.
Out the corner of my eye I saw her. I spun and caught her arm but I couldn’t stop her from colliding with me. We fell to the floor. The blade pierced the air just inches from my throat, but I somehow managed to bend her arm and the knife away from me as she spat all kinds of obscenities.
The short struggle on our nasty carpet that followed ended with the knife slipping deep into my mother’s chest. I watched in horror as a dark red stain soaked through her cheap, ragged shirt and onto my hands and clothes.
The world stopped. It was as if the whole of reality had crashed into this unmovable moment and came to an abrupt and violent halt.
Boiling pools of salt water burned at my eyes as realization came upon me, the realization of what I had done. Trembling, I held her close to me in my lap as the tears burned down my cheeks. Seconds passed like minutes. Over and over I told her I was sorry. It was all I could say to her.
Then, her body quivered in my arms. Faintly I heard her whisper something about me in Hell and taking care of the cats. And just like that, with a long exhale, she fell limp.
I don’t know how long I sat on the floor with the corpse of my mother lying across my legs. Slowly, a sea of cats formed around us. They meowed and pawed at the body, sensing something was wrong. One of them, Margaret, gazed accusingly at me with her bulbous yellow-green eyes. As we sat looking at one another there in the thick silence of the room, there came upon me the creepiest of feelings, that the wretched loose spirit of my mother was watching me through those eyes, judging me. Hating me.
Then suddenly, all my pores opened to release a cold sweat as panic overtook my sorrow.
I had killed my own mother. Yes, in self-defense, but a jury would convict me! People don’t like sons who kill their mothers, regardless of the circumstances. How could I explain this to the police? To anyone? Regardless of the truth and all the evidence I could show—as if the number of cats weren’t enough—they would never believe me. Even if they did, I’d be labeled a monster, fired from my low-end job, thrown away in some prison for the rest of my life!
I couldn’t simply hide her body. We lived in a fairly secluded area; she had no real friends who would come to look for her. But the bodies are almost always found.
I’d watched enough television cop dramas to know that. What was I going to do? Someone was sure to discover what happened. They would find her eventually. My life would be ruined.
I was over. Done!
Finished!
Unless…