At seven years old, he hesitated to kill a moth. He had the inclination, truly, to punish its flapping existence, its life-as-nuisance. The choice died in his mind as soon as he decided it would be a sin. Distressed and ashamed, he went on to become a Jain for a short time between his eighth and twelfth birthdays. As a direct result of his reading God’s various obituaries, his violence returned when puberty hit, and the period of previous peace died slowly in his arms. Over the course of his life, he killed the following animals:
Two partridges
Seventeen fish
One unlucky hamster
One opossum
Six chickens
One hog
He said a brief prayer each time he took a life, but didn’t feel a single pang of guilt after he turned thirteen.
When Albert Ross was fourteen years old, he tucked a handwritten note into his back pocket and refused to meet her eyes. One day passed; four days passed. The note was washed and dried in the machines, and the ink bled out.
He didn’t try out for the football team, but he was close. A single deterrence killed off his courage the morning of: he’d read into the pulp at the bottom of his orange juice cup, seeing what was unmistakably a deer with a broken neck––a forbidding omen. One more fragment of Albert chipped away that day.
He had nightmares, but they always ended. He didn’t write down his dreams, though, and so they were promptly forgotten as the mornings dragged on.
Albert had one friend: myself. No one else was watching his shifting posture when he changed his mind, when he took a moment too long to decide, when he let inclinations become stillborns. Ideas rotted inside him and created necrotic wounds from which he would later suffer a delayed punishment for postponement of gratification.
Albert was a good man, in general: he had a family and a career and few to no DUIs. But he died thousands of times, and resurrected just short of that many. I watched him wane day to day, and I hesitated, and I said nothing.
May he rest like the rest of us.