Growing up, let’s just say I had a bit of an anger problem. One day, my brother and I must have gotten into a fight. Maybe he pushed me or hit me or stuck his tongue out at me or something. I don’t really know what he did and I guess it doesn’t really matter because the point is that at some point he thought the fight was over, and he turned his back on me. And in Wildlife 101, you should learn to never turn your back on an angry, feral animal.
So there I am, so angry I’m seeing red, teeth clenched, I run up to him and bite him. Like, a full flesh-in-teeth kind of bite. He starts to bleed and he falls on the floor, crying out. Blood is already running down his back, tracing along his ribs before it drops to the floor. For some reason, I slap his back too, making a ruddled handprint, kind of like one of those drawing the ancients did in those prehistoric caves in France.
Then I stepped back and watched my brother huddled on the ground. That’s when I got scared, but not of what I’d done, but what my parents would do. And so, logically, I happened to have one of those plastic storage container things laying nearby, and so I put that over him. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe my understanding of object permanence hadn’t really ossified fully then, or something. I put this container over him and sat on it. It muffled him when he said “[something] [something] can’t breathe” as he tried to jerk me and the container off of him.
It almost felt like riding a carousel. Going up and down, up and down….
Eventually, the ups stopped going quite so high, and his screaming got quieter and quieter. When he stopped making noises and sounds, I got off and pushed the container off of him. He was lying on the ground weak and wheezing, my bloody handprint smeared on his back.
My mom came downstairs and asked what was going on. I bolted out the door.