THE CAT'S MAW

CHAPTER XV

XV:  OF DOGS AND DISTRACTIONS

There were no dreams the next night, because there was no sleep. As the cherry glow of dawn crept over the hill, Billy's mind was made.

The boy had spent his entire life being afraid. He had bent, and cowered, and surrendered to most everyone in his young life because, deep down, he felt that they deserved to be happy more than he did.

But on this day, things would be different.

Billy sat on the bed and stared out the window. The sky warmed, splashing amber waves across the meadow. Golden rays shone through the gauze of willow trees, kissing the sheen of dew that blanketed the world. Until, at last, the sun burst free from the earth, blinding and radiant above the slabs and spires of stone that held quiet vigil in the graveyard on the hill.

Billy sat there for over an hour, waiting. He drummed his fingers against the cast, and rocked back and forth on the bed, repeating a silent prayer to anything that would listen.

He scoured his notes from the dream, desperate to find something that he might've missed. After countless reviews of underlined passages and circled words and bolded arrows of ink on the page, Billy crumpled it up and tossed it at the bin. The paper bounced off the rim, and rolled to a stop on a grooved heating vent.

I was wrong, he thought, slamming his head down on the pillows and making the whole bed shake. It's all wrong. 

He heard his father's car honk twice. He was departing early for work to make up for taking the afternoon off. He heard his mother clomping around the kitchen. She was cooking the 'special breakfast' that was meant as some kind of consolation prize for the bad news to come. 

Billy curled in a one-legged ball with the pillows around his head. He began to drift, lost in defeat and the dull thump of his own heart droning in his skull. The boy resigned himself to a brief sleep, to one last escape before his life changed forever.

But then something happened. It was an entirely unexpected something, a violent shake that freed the boy from his daze and despair.

Screaming.

Billy's mother was screaming downstairs. He heard the backdoor slam, and confusion in the kitchen. There was stomping across the living room, and a clumsy thunder up the stairs.

The bedroom door burst open, and there was Elizabeth Brahm — panting, sheet-white, with both eyes popping out of her head like an angry cartoon. She held a pair of field binoculars in her pale, trembling hands.

"What's going on?" Billy sat up, feigning sudden wakefulness.

"I need to–" she struggled for breath, "I need to see something." She moved to the window and held the binoculars up, smooshing her glasses askew. She squinted, bent the lens arms, and adjusted the focus knob with a shaky thumb.

"Oh no...oh no, no, NO!"

"What is it?" Billy said, pressing his face against the glass and following her line of sight. She was aimed at the back garden.