It was a strange day

He still remembered it years
after it happened

Usually when he got
drunk

It didn’t take much for him
to get drunk
Sometimes two beers
were more than enough

He was perhaps
five or six
and big sister was in her early
teens
She was a rebel

Wore thick makeup
and revealing clothes
and fake piercings
and argued with mom and dad
about tattoos
and boyfriends

But on that day mom and dad
weren’t home
and there wasn’t much to do
in those times. There was
nothing interesting on TV
and the internet wasn’t a thing

But big sister had an idea

That morning they found the cat
dead in the basement. It was
old enough to die. Big sister
went there and retrieved it
and brought it upstairs
and placed it on the window sill
and they watched as birds
came to eat the maggots from
its rotting flesh

Big sister seemed to really
enjoy the show
and he didn’t want to upset her
so he pretended he
enjoyed too

These days
the drunker he’d get, the more
vivid the memory
would play in his head

He had three beers
now