The Cat is out of the Bag

The second Kyle shut the front door on his way out to school, his mother, Lee, grabbed the vacuum and Febreze. The odor emanating from her son’s room had become unbearable. She’d tried relentlessly to get him to clean it; how he could stand living in the stench was totally beyond her. Lee had even offered to clean it for him, but Kyle continually and angrily shot down her kind offers. He didn’t want his mother anywhere near his room. Being fifteen, Lee hadn’t thought too much of it. She’d assumed her son wanted extra space now that he was growing up. She knew that it was normal for him to start becoming more withdrawn; he wasn’t a little boy anymore. As much as Lee tried to convince herself of this, she felt that there was a deeper meaning to Kyle’s strong stand against his mother entering his bedroom.

A mother always knows when something is bothering her child.

As Lee hauled her cleaning supplies down the hall to Kyle’s door, the smell became stronger. She couldn’t place exactly what was causing it, but she figured it had to be rotting food, considering how often her son took his dinner into his room. Lee turned the knob of the door, only to find it firmly locked from the inside. She was dumbfounded. Why did Kyle need to lock his door so badly? He never remembered to lock the front door when he came home late, and for God’s sake, he still pissed with the bathroom door open! This need for extreme privacy was becoming very unnerving. There was something in his bedroom that Kyle really didn’t want his mother to see.

Lee was getting nervous. She needed to know what her child was hiding from her. Dropping her cleaning supplies, she went into the garage and retrieved the crowbar her husband had left behind when he moved out about a year ago. She had no idea why he’d owned one in the first place, but she was glad now that he did. Returning inside, she jammed the crowbar into the crack of the door and yanked, jimmying the tool this way and that. To her surprise, the door broke open quickly, and the moment it did, a horrid stench filled the hallway. Lee nearly gagged. Upon entering, the first thing she did was inspect the lock Kyle had installed. It was cheap; something probably bought from Walmart, which explained why it had been so easy for his mother to break in. Lee was shocked when she walked into the bedroom, not only because the realization hit her that her son had actually used his own allowance money to buy a lock, but because Kyle’s room was completely spotless. There were no dirty clothes on the floor, no plates of food strewn around the room, and there was even a fan on! But the air the fan was blowing did not smell clean, it smelled absolutely rotten-it smelled like something was dead.

Now Lee was very nervous. The possibility of the smell being spoiled food was out, and it obviously wasn’t dirty laundry, so what the hell was it? Up until this very moment, Lee had been nearly positive that, upon entering her son’s bedroom, she would find some Playboys, or maybe a link to poorly filmed porno on her son’s beat up laptop. She was almost positive that that would be what he was hiding from her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Lee desperately yanked open all of his dresser drawers in search of what she actually hoped was magazines. Nothing. Kyle’s clothes were neatly folded and put away. She opened the small laptop that had been left on his desk, but there was a passcode.

Screw it, she thought. I have to find out what stinks in here.

Though it had been the last thing she’d wanted to do, she didn’t have much of a choice. Lifting her nose in the air like a dog, Lee inhaled deeply and followed the trace of the scent. It led directly under her son’s bed. She peered underneath and spotted what appeared to be a duffle bag. Hesitantly, Lee reached under the bed and grasped the bag with shaking fingers. Sliding it out into the light, the first thing she noticed were the fresh bloodstains on the fabric. Lee caught her breath in her throat. Gathering her courage, she unzipped the bag as fast as she could; she knew that if she did so slowly, she’d lose her nerve to open it altogether

The severed heads of countless neighborhood house cats toppled out onto the floor; there had been so many stuffed in the bag that, once unzipped, they practically just rolled out. Lee screamed, then scuttled backwards like a cockroach, terrified and shocked. Her mind raced. She knew that Kyle had been different since his father left the picture. Lee knew how hard the split had been on him-hell, it had been hard on everyone. What Lee didn’t know was, to Kyle, the divorce had been the final crushing blow to his already tender sanity. After the suicidal thoughts had passed, the homicidal ones emerged, and Kyle had finally begun to act on them.

Lee kicked the duffle bag and bloody cat heads back underneath the bed and scrambled to get out of the room, forgetting the vacuum and Febreze. She tried to slam Kyle’s door shut behind her, but it was broken and wouldn't close, so she sunk to the ground against the wall in the hallway. Lee was too shocked to cry, but shocked enough to cover her mouth with her hands and begin hyperventilating. Before she could form a coherent thought, she heard the front door open and close again.

The sound of squeaking sneakers filled her ears. Lee’s stomach dropped.

“Hey mom, I forgot my laptop, I need it for English today because…” Kyle stopped when he rounded the corner and saw his mother leaning against his bedroom door. His eyes scanned over the scene; his mother afraid on the ground, his broken door, the smell seeping into the rest of the house. Lee's heartbeat was deafening; she was sure even Kyle could hear it. Never before had she been scared of her own child. Now she was petrified.

Kyle’s voice was calm, with no tone or infliction to the statement, and his expression was completely neutral. “You went in my room.”

Lee could only nod, her hands still cupped tightly around her mouth.

Kyle’s eyes locked with his mother’s. He could read her every emotion. Shocked, scared, sad, disappointed. Kyle didn’t care; he hadn’t cared about anything in a long time. He blinked slowly, then, to Lee’s absolute horror, began to smile.