Cats are silly (and Moms are weird)

The strangest object caught my eye when I went home for Easter this time. It was this mobile-type thing hanging above the porch. You know, those dangling things that people hang above babies’ cots to keep them entertained, which they do, for about thirty seconds, after which the babies promptly get back to screaming and hollering and demanding that their parents find something new to entertain them with. The baby mobiles usually have some plastic elephants, and hippos, and also other miscellaneous animals that do not resemble anything in actual existence dangling from them. But this one that mom had hung up had…DEAD BIRDS? 

I was revolted and fascinated. Me. The person who adores movies about demons, and zombies, and vampires, and chewing of body parts, and blood-letting. Two regular dudes fighting and spitting blood on TV, and I’m all like, change the channel, change the channel! But a zombie grunting and dragging his broken foot behind him, and chewing on a human, and I’m absolutely riveted.

I was all like, Mom, WTF? Except that I didn’t use THAT WORD, ‘cause we’re still made to sit in a corner facing the wall for an hour if we do.

Me: Ma, do you know how creepy this is?

Mom: What? They’re just birds.

Me: Dead birds! That have been stuffed and are now dangling in front of people’s faces.

Mom: Don’t be silly. They’re plastic, and covered in feathers. They only look real. And besides, the man who was selling them was blind. I had to put them up.

Me: He was blind! How would he know if you took them and threw them in the bin?

Mom just gave me that look. You know, the Mom Look,  which, depending on the context, indicates that she cannot, for the life of her, figure out how I turned into a cold-hearted blasphemer/idiot/rebel child, despite her best efforts.

The next morning, I found the thing lying on the porch, in a tangled mess. One bird didn’t have a head and the others looked like something had made a very sincere effort to rip them apart, but had got no juicy limbs to chew on, only PLASTIC. I looked around, and saw a stray cat crouching in the bushes, looking at me as if to say-

“What’s wrong with you, you crazy, *&%#ing sadistic humans? What kind of a joke is this anyway?”

To which all I could say was "What? She had to put them up. Have a heart! The man who sold them to her was blind, for God’s sake!”