My Brains!!!

I awoke
with blood on my hands. It had happened
again. The thing with my brain. I stood up from my desk and looked what I had
done. No, not me. My brain.

The pills
had stopped working.

The cat was
torn nearly in two, its guts pulled out on the desktop. A pile of papers were by my feet, haphazardly
stacked. They were inked with red,
roughly the width of say, an index finger.
It took a moment to recognize the symbols that had literally bled
through as letters because the top page was turned face down.

I?d been
writing again.

?Oh no,? I
moaned. I couldn?t do this again. I?d promised myself. Promised Nancy. Too many bad things had happened the last
time. Fiction had almost killed my
marriage and me. They?d taken the kids
away before. There?d be no way we?d get
them back if it had gotten out of hand again.
They?d probably throw me in the deepest hole they could find.

?No way,? I
said, looking at the nearly divided-in-two Oscar-the-Cat. I looked at the scratches up and down my
forearms. He?d put up a fight. But my brain had fixed him, apparently. All four of his legs were broken.

My little
girl was going to be crushed. I couldn?t
let her find out. Had to hide it. All of it.
I?d tell Nancy Oscar-the-Cat had run away and we?d break the news to
Anna tonight. I couldn?t lie to her all
on my own. It had never worked before.

I ran
downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a big garbage bag out the pantry. The cat went in first, followed by June
through November of the big paper calendar on my desktop. Oscar-the-Cat had really soaked in. I scratched my chin?had to think of a way to
explain all the missing months later. I
opened the mouth of the bag after putting it on the floor and turned to scoop
up the bloody manuscript.

It was
tempting as I hefted the weight of it in my hands. At least fifty pages. I turned it over even though I knew I
shouldn?t have.

Brick
hid at the bottom on the other side of the berm. He clenched the gun, listening to the
laughers over there and their clinking glasses as they drank wine and ate a
variety of cheeses. Neither he nor his
gun had been invited, but they were about to crash the party in a big-big way.

No. Had to stop.
If it were something my brain had written it could only be bad. I couldn?t risk it. Didn?t have time for anything other than the
mess it had made. I dropped the
manuscript in and closed up the bag with a twisty-tie.

When I
picked up the bag, it became obvious with the cat and the hundred or so pages
that there was more than a dead cat and a fifth of a ream of paper inside. Too weighty.
I undid the twisty-tie, suddenly squeamish about touching an animal
carcass and glad he was covered by several months and gingerly dug out the
manuscript.

There. That was it.
Too much blood.

Considering
I used to be a writer, I was familiar enough with how much a ream of paper
weighed. Oscar-the-Cat had spent many a
night in my lap and I knew how much he weighed too. The weight of June through November was
negligible I figured, so that meant the manuscript had been written in more
than Oscar-the-Cat?s blood.

But
(hopefully) what?s?