Vile Evil Albany Old Lady

It comes back to me every now and then, in a rush of anger and despair, when I remember that old lady, that church lady, who preached Jesus and church and waved her American flag and lied to me worse than anyone has ever lied to me. And she was unspeakably cruel to some kittens.

She'd asked me to help trap them for fixing. She said she'd feed them. I took them up for surgery, she was to pick them up afterwards because I had to go to Salem.

I picked up my traps a few days later. She said she had turned them loose and they were doing great.

It was months later, out of guilt I suppose, that she confessed to what she really did with those kittens.

I was trapping in the same neighborhood, off Queen, on 13th street or one of those little streets behind that gas station, in the neighborhood south and west of the high school on Queen, just as Queen heads south to fork into Oakville North and Riverside Drive.

She approached me. Walked down a block and a half and came up to me, where I sat in my car, watching traps. I was tired out and finally I asked her how the kittens were doing. That's when she told me. She hadn't really brought them all home. Only one of them.

The others she took to North Albany right after picking them up at Countryside, and dumped them out along the road when they were still under the influence of anesthesia. It was raining, too, she further confessed, and maybe they survived anyway. She said because it was dark and raining so hard she couldn't see exactly where she was, when she dumped them out, so she couldn't tell me exactly where it'd been. I had immediately wanted to know where.

I wanted to take that bitch by the throat and choke the life out of the lying creep, who had exploited me and my time and Poppa money, and committed this atrocious act upon innocent lives.

I told her she better run now, and get away from me fast because what she had just told me was enraging me. I also told her to go get her checkbook and write me a check for the money Poppa paid to fix those cats, in good faith, that she had betrayed in an act of extreme cruelty.

She must have thought I would think it was ok, because she didn't seem to understand at first that when I said for her to get out of my sight immediately, that I meant it. I hissed in her face then. It was a gut response to my shock and horror. She started to walk away, then turned back, like she was going to say something more. I hissed again and told her she needed to start running. She ran.

I started pounding on my steering wheel in anguish for those poor cats, angry at myself too for believing such a little self-righteous old lady in the first place. The better than thou preachy Christian old ladies are often the meanest most cruel most hateful most dishonest people I encounter. I don't know why.

I spent the next two weeks searching all of north Albany, walking the roads, knocking on doors. Of course that was an impossible feat. It'd been months since she did that deed. That is a massive area to search.

I'd sit in my car in that neighborhood over off Queen, where I was trapping other cats, and stare at that bitch out in her yard and try to figure out how a person is able to do such a thing, to helpless little lives.

I would look at her and wonder how a person justifies such acts, still goes to church, still pretends they're righteous with a right to tell other people how they should worship and live their moral lives.

I would wonder what turns a person that evil.

I think about it now and then. I still cringe for those cats. My stomach reels. It's hard. I try not to think about these things, but sometimes they surface in my mind and there's no stopping the thinking.

It's best to forget.