A story of childhood trauma by Alexis Scarbro
We moved to the middle of nowhere in Powassin, Ontario, Canada when I was six years old. Dad said we’d like it, we could drive to the dump nearby on Fridays, and watch the bears eat the garbage. We had land to explore all around us, and we were closer to my favorite place, Lion’s Head. Mom told me to lay off demanding a trip until we settled down. Mom said there were no jobs up here, she didn’t know how we’d afford the coming winter. Dad wasn’t coming to the house yet, he was wrapping up our last rented house back in Orangeville (or so he said; really? He was moving his things in and bedding up with a lady-friend in Toronto, never to return home to us. His intention was to strand my mother as far out in the wilderness so she’d suffer; he was vindictive like that).
Our house was tiny and sat in the center of a giant, mowed, fenced-in lawn. There was no garage, but a small out-building was decaying by the edge of the lawn where the deep woods loomed. My brother and I were going to share the attic for our playroom; it had a pull-down staircase with a looped string. I begged to pull on it, I loved seeing the stairs unfold and nearly touch the floor, like magic.
I saw kids playing out on the dirt road in front of our house. They kept shuffling their feet and looking up at the house, maybe they were gathering the courage to knock on our door. We asked if we could say hello and Mom told us to stay away from the woods, to keep our noses up for the smell of something stinky (could be a bear), and to stay together. My brother and I ran out to play.
There were three of them; one child was short; he had a nose full of boogers, which he picked at, constantly. There was a girl my age, with long, tan pigtails down her back, and an older girl who was likely my brother’s age. The girls both wore matching shirts; I hated when Ma made my brother and I dress like twins. The older girl was tall; she had freckles on her cheeks and arms, her dark hair was parted down the center and her abundant bangs shadowed the colour of her eyes. I thought she was strange; her eyes stayed hovering on my mouth as I spoke, not on my eyes, like I was accustomed to. She appeared anxious or concerned, but didn’t say hello, nor tell us what her name was. She also had a white cat around her neck –then, it was sitting in her arms like a fat goose, and all of the sudden, it was wrapping around her arm like a boa constrictor. It was the most lovely, white cat I’d ever seen and its eyes were gold, like the real thing; we all nodded in agreement.
The oldest girl with the cat didn’t speak, instead she nodded and bumped her siblings softly with her elbow. She tilted her head toward the long, winding road ahead and then sort of smiled at her siblings. The boy asked if we wanted to walk with them to buy eggs from the farm down the road and we said yes. They didn’t tell us why she didn’t talk and we didn’t ask. We could communicate without words.
As we walked along, the silence of the area was loud. The wind softly slid through the needles of the towering pines with a gentle shushing sound. The Canadian fir trees towered above our small skeletons as we wandered from the crunchy edges of the road to inspect bugs and pretty rocks. We meandered towards an unseen farm up ahead and I imagined what the eggs would look like. We picked up odd conversations, laughed a lot, and my brother’s social awkwardness got me making excuses for him. The kids said, “Pshaw!” and we kept our slow walk.
Suddenly the air was pierced with the biting bark of a German Shepherd. His fuzzy mane was lifted high on his back, nearly doubling his appearance as he lunged towards us, stopped only by his chain.
I saw the scene open up, there was a litter strewn lawn; the doghouse had seen better days; it didn’t appear that anyone was home because I saw no car in the driveway. It was like a magnet was in that dog’s mouth, for the white cat stood up on the tall girl’s shoulders, leapt, and darted directly towards it. Like a lead was connected from the stomach of that giant canine directly to the mind of our beloved, snow white feline, the shepherd opened up and the white cat was clamped upon and lifted up from the beaten lawn. Then, the shepherd shook little fuzzy buns long and hard.
We stood helpless on the dirt road; we were paralyzed. All we could do was simply watch as those gold eyes with black slivers expressing a good life went slowly rolling up into the white cat’s head, never to light upon us again.
