How to Break a Woman
3 vignettes from the late 80s-90s.
TW: animal abuse, suicide. This essay is dark. If this concerns you, please don’t read it. I have hundreds of other essays, short stories, and tutorials available online.
I. 1989, 1996
My mother hands him a sack with two kittens. They are orange and black with tiny paws, and they mew and claw while I sit on the couch changing channels. Wheel! Of! Fortune! They mew and claw while they sit in a sack in my pop’s Jeep. They mew and claw when he presses his lips shut and walks through the cold to the little pond beyond the freeway. They mew and claw as they’re being lowered into the water. I am changing channels. I gulp mouthfuls of air they don’t have. I imagine plastic bags on my face while I change channels. All because the kittens made a mess of the carpet. This is what happens when you don’t learn fast enough.
I’ve seen hundreds of true crime shows and autopsy photos. I’ve seen bodies in caskets and sprawled out on tile floors like snow angels. But this, two shivering kittens, lowered into the water, breaks me in ways I never thought I could be broken.
The hurt came early and remained in my house like a shadow. It was the lover who would never leave even after you shouted last call and bolted all the doors and shuttered the lights. The hurt, you’ll…
