The Monster Devours

(Part Three-Dean Paul: The Ghoul.

Biographical Series About My Childhood. This story deals with extreme violence against animals.)

***TRIGGER WARNING: This is not a trigger warning to lure you to read. This bothered me, alot. If you are an animal lover and sensitive then it is BEST you skip this one.***

Dean Paul presented himself to others as a hard-working fatherly man, but something was lurking within him, just below the surface. Something angry that was always straining to burst free. Something that he could barely control and when he lost it and it was free, then you had better not be the closest one to him.

That something was a monster. Adults could rarely see it, but all six of us kids knew. My stepsisters Diane and Joni knew. My brother Ken knew. My sisters Julie and Lisa knew. All of the neighborhood kids knew. They would stay away from our house. Sadly, even animals knew.

One day, we were working in the garden and a large rabbit ran from a nearby burrow. Dean Paul, who was wearing gloves, stuck his hand down the hole, pulling out several tiny baby rabbits. 

I watched with great horror as he stomp the baby rabbits to death, one by one, with his big work boots. All the while snort laughing as he glared at Ken and I. I was only ten years old and my brother had just turned nine. After that, each time I was forced to go back to the garden I got sick to my stomach. 

The rabbits were just the tip of the iceburg. Dean Paul was in a constant war with my sisters’ cats. There were three. Pookie, Snowball, and Tiger. Pookie and Tiger were stripped silver and black Tabby’s. 

Snowball was a pure white rare beauty with light blue eyes. Not a hint of any other color on her. Pure white cats with blue eyes are extremely rare and come in at less than 1.5 percent of the feline population. She was a kind and loving animal. 

My stepfather’s hatred of the cats intensified after he had spent several months training a blackbird to eat from his hand. He named the bird Fernando. One of the cats also developed a strong like for Fernando, and ate him. 

Soon, our cats would flee when they saw Dean Paul coming. This had a lot to do with the fact that he had started throwing them into the pool whenever he caught them. Chortling in his half-snorting, half-snarling way.

He would launch the terrified animals off the back deck of the house, flinging them twenty-feet into the air, hissing and mewling as they hit the deep waters. My brother and I would get all scratched up rescuing the panic-stricken animals. 

One day Dean Paul tripped over our favorite cat, Snowball. He put the squealing animal into a plastic trash bag and smashed her against the concrete block garage wall in front of us. I still have trouble coming to grips with that. 

Tigger and Pookie disappeared a short time later. I’m not sure if Dean Paul killed them or if my mother took them away to save them. I have always hoped it was the latter. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Okay, I planned to write more in this chapter, but I am having trouble continuing. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t cry as I wrote this series, but this addition has proven me a liar. 

I think I’m going to have to take a break here and clear my head from all the bad memories. The next installment we will get into Dean Paul’s holiness.