Kicking Up My Heels...in Heels by Liam Livings

Author:Liam Livings [Livings, Liam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NineStar Press, LGBT, gay, Cross-dressing, drag queens, AIDS
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

EVERY TIME I used that makeup I thought back to the little room at the back of Boots and Mum’s face when she’d arrived. I never shoplifted anything again. Mum had said, when we got home that evening, if I ever did something like that again, she’d not come to help me out and I would have to fend for myself in the prison as I’d be getting what I deserved.

It didn’t stop me moping about the house though. Oh no. I was well into the moping. Although I knew I wasn’t invincible as the shoplifting had proved, I still felt a general lack of interest in life, a grey fog had descended around me.

Since the letter and the overwhelming feeling of loss I now felt, I kept expecting other losses to line themselves up in front of me, queuing to unburden themselves at my feet. I expected Mum to get sick again and return to the hospital. I expected us to lose the house for a whole host of reasons, some rational, but most irrational.

I also started to wonder what artefacts I’d leave behind for everyone to remember of me. When I was a little boy, we had a cat that got run over, in the dead-end road where we lived, among lots of other cats who seemed to happily negotiate their way across the road, our grey short-haired cat, Smokey, had taken a wrong turn, made a wrong judgement and got hit. When I got back from school, Mum and Dad told me what had happened and explained he was wrapped in an old towel on the kitchen floor, and did I want to say goodbye to him before Dad buried him in the garden.

“Is there blood?” I asked, both fascinated by the thought of seeing a dead thing, and also terrified it would be too much to cope with.

“No,” Dad replied.

So, I walked to the kitchen, holding Mum’s hand and Dad pulled the towel back, to reveal a dead Smokey, lying on the towel, his mouth open, and his eyes staring into nowhere. There was, I was slightly disappointed to note, no blood. I said goodbye to him, stroking his fur, which felt the same, but different as he was cold.

We said a few words as Dad buried him in the back garden, wrapped in the same towel.

“Is it because he got blood on it?” I asked Mum, why she didn’t want the towel back, oddly focussing on strange things, but as a four-year-old, that had seemed the most important thing out of the whole mess of losing our family pet.

“No, love, it’s because we want to wrap him in it.”

But oddly, that wasn’t the worst bit of losing Smokey. After the few words and the burial, I thought it was all over, that would be it, but was struck by how upset I became at the smallest of things I noticed around the house reminding me of Smokey: his bowl Mum had washed and left

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.