Eaten Alive by Devon MacDougall

"They’re eating him alive, Devon."

I looked down at the pitiful body. Our cat was lying there, clips of fur missing, maggots and soapy residue all over him.

Mom was kneeling next to him, yellow gloves and soap on her hands.

I’ve kept this memory as hidden as I could for years now.

I hide quite a lot of information from others. Memories, feelings, knowledge, they’re all often kept inside my head. I carry this silence all the time, and it’s pretty uncomfortable.

It’s not that I don’t ever talk; I often talk too much. But usually about meaningless things—truly weightless things.

Silence, though physically weightless, weighs on my back like the heavens on Atlas. I often don’t talk about why I’m angry.

When this happens, the silence, paradoxically enough, becomes noise. Since I don’t talk to people about what I’m feeling, I end up talking to myself, creating endless noise in my head. I blame myself for what’s happened, and I can’t be convinced otherwise. Thoughts run around and around, and never get tired, so I end up thinking about one or two things all the time, losing focus on pretty much everything.

In a way, I keep silent for the sake of other people. I’ve learned that getting mad or angry with a person is never a good thing. All that happens is I look for other reasons to be mad with them, to somehow justify what I’m feeling. This ends up damaging whatever relationship I may have with that person.

Since I don’t get mad with other people and it is human nature to find a scapegoat, I usually turn to myself. This may stop me from hurting other people’s feelings, but it weighs heavily on my self-esteem.

When something happens, I usually warp the details of the event based on the way I feel. What others may or may not have witnessed loses its validity, and what I remember becomes the real truth.

This is what happened:

My brother, a friend, and I came in from playing street hockey one day. It was nothing unusual at first; we put our pads and skates away and closed the garage door as we went inside.

We didn’t know it, but Smoky, our cat, had waltzed into the garage sometime during the time we were playing hockey, and was left in there for a day at least. My brother and I were shocked as our parents took him out when they heard him crying in the garage.

My brother Byron and I played hockey a lot, whether it was on the street or in a video game. I remember one time, we were playing our fairly new NHL Faceoff 2000 on our Playstation. We were losing, so Byron asked that he play that game on his own, because he did better that way.

So I apologized, said I understood, and left.

Byron’s at Harvard now, which is a bit too much for me to live up to. I’m not as good a student as Byron was. I learned sometime along the road that I don’t really need to study as much as Byron does, which suits me just fine. I try to avoid studying, and chances are I always will.

I’m thoroughly convinced that I’ll never get into Harvard, which is really my fault. I guess if I want to follow Byron, I just have to work harder at school, but I know I won’t. So I’ll end up going to some "lesser" college, to the disappointment of my family. I guess I’ll be a bit disappointed, because I’ll feel if I tried harder I’d have gotten into some Ivy League, but that’s not really anything new.

Whether or not that’s true, I’ve convinced myself of it, so whatever happens may be warped by my conviction.

I convince myself of a lot of things that people would tell me aren’t true.

This is what I remember:

I came in from playing street hockey one day. It was nothing unusual at first; I put my pads and skates away and closed the garage door as I went inside.

I didn’t know it, but Smoky, my cat, had waltzed into the garage sometime during the time I was playing hockey, and was left in there for a day at least. I was shocked as our parents took him out when they heard him crying in the garage.

While in there the maggots from the trash had covered his body. His fur was tangled and moist, and he was meowing pitifully. Mom carried him away and soaped him down and clipped off hair and wrangled out maggots. He lay there, hair clipped off in some spots, mom rubbing him down with soapy rubber gloves.

We decided to put him to sleep. He was going through a lot of suffering, and we thought it was the better thing to do.

His death has stayed in my mind for some years now. I’ve tried reconciling myself in the fact that he was old anyway.

He was actually only about five years old.

I’ve tried reassuring myself that he was lonely now that Chloe, our dog, had been put to sleep.

We had just gotten another kitten to keep him company. They weren’t really in love with each other, if you catch my drift, but it was certainly better than nothing.

But I can’t let everything I carry weigh so heavily on my mind like that.

I believe that for every force in the universe there is an opposite force to balance things out. I’ve learned that that holds true for the weight I carry.

In each of my blazers I carry a pocket Bible. I carry it around as one of my little gimmicks. "It’ll save my life one day, I promise," I tell people. "Just like in that James Bond movie where the guy stabs him with a knife, but the wad of money in his pocket takes the blow. Something will almost kill me, and God will save my life."

Of course, there’s a deeper reason for carrying it.

No matter how much I may blame myself for anything that’s happened, the Bible reminds me that I’ll be forgiven if I ask.

In a way I need it. Not necessarily the Bible, but that faith. It gives me something to hold on to, as I can’t always trust people to forgive.

Don’t get me wrong, I know people do forgive, but people often don’t forget, and that can cause issues. Besides, they usually just tell me that it wasn’t my fault to begin with, but if I think, even subconsciously, that it was, it doesn’t help, even though it’s comforting for a moment or two. Though if you happen to make the mistake of being mad with somebody, you should ask that person to forgive you, because it’s not going to do oodles of good if they don’t think you’re sorry.

I’ve often asked God to forgive me for killing our cat. I have to, since I can’t think of anyone who would understand that there’s no way I could be convinced it wasn’t my fault.

Like the maggots, that memory will chew me up for as long as I live.

I may not remember exactly what happened, but I’ll remember the truth. I’ll remember that Smoky’s death was my fault.

"He’s covered in maggots. They’re eating him alive, Devon."

I know that as I progress through life, I’ll find more things to carry that will be just as heavy or even more so.

I’ll find more pounds to place on my back, more anger, and most of all more things to feel guilty for.

But no matter how heavy those things get, there will always be the counterweight of forgiveness when I need it.