Officer Alex deals with some...issues
I was still trying to slow my pulse down and control my anger when I heard the cell phone ringing in the living room. Whoever it was, was not important. It could wait.
I took advantage of the dim light in the room and closed my eyes to facilitate the cooling down process when I heard the ringer stop and the footsteps of the person carrying it approach. “Are you serious?” I whispered, eyes still closed.
I turned around and faced the dining room area that separated the living room from the den area I was in, and Hulk Hogan handed me the phone, ducking his head from the admittedly low ceiling. “You really need to take this,” he said softly. “It’s important.” So I did, and he left the room. He didn’t call me brother…?
It was Dad. “Princess got out. Have you seen her?” he asked. “Dad, I’m in Minnesota. You know I haven’t,” I said politely.
“This is different,” he said. “She was biting people.” He paused, distracted. “I thought she may have tagged along.”
Dad was never worried and I do recall her acting strangely, so I walked outside to humor both him as well as myself I suppose. It was winter and there were leaves covering the ground and nothing to see but grey clouds and bare branches, but it wasn’t all that cold for once. I secretly wanted a brisk walk with biting cold to take my mind off of earlier, but I’ll take moderate temperatures while they lasted, I suppose.
I was walking around the edge of the lake (a pond, really) when I saw her. Short and squat, she was a Himalayan cat that would have otherwise blended in with the earth toned leaves but for her hint of blond…her hair was flat and skin was exposed in that way unique to a deceased animal, but she was standing up and facing the water under a pile of leafless vines.
It struck me as strange, but the word was quickly redefined as I walked around her in an arc to see her face.
There she was, clearly lifeless but standing on three legs, one forearm raised up and pointing towards the water, her mouth and eyes open…and just the hint of a beak protruding from her mouth on her otherwise flat face.
Below her neck was a series of crab legs protruding from her chest, mounted on segmented plates that looked like the belly of a turtle but with eight distinct legs ranging from two or three inches to eight or nine, shorter on the bottom and longer towards her neck, but still also seeming to point in the same direction of the lake (pond), as if to signal something having been shot out of her mouth…into the water.
I spoke softly into the phone, “Dad…who exactly had she bitten that you can remember?” He paused to reply, but never did. He had passed away four years earlier, so that made sense.
……………
There. That is what’s in my head. Those are my dreams.
I was going to write a column on longevity in policing—how long people stay, and why they tend to stay those lengths of time (from two years to 25), or maybe something about PTSD I’ve wanted to approach from as extremely neutral a point as I possibly could have based on a real life story out of Nashville Metro, but a whole bunch of NONE of that was going to happen until those words saw the light of day, so, you’re welcome.
Utter bunch of nonsense if you ask me. Why do our brains do this? What’s the purpose here? Is it like a big document dump, some kind of mental relief valve…or is it more like a WikiLeaks dump, to get the word out about something buried?
I’m a cop. Of course I have bad dreams, but at least when I’m standing on the Washington Monument and it’s raining pickles or the porcelain baby on the nightstand is crying and moving and bleeding that makes sense, but this?
Hulk Hogan?
I’ve never even watched WWE, not even when it was WWF!
Next time. I’ll do better next time now that this is out of my brain. I appreciate your patience, and if any of you have been bitten by a cat recently…talk to your parents, okay?
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.