It was the scream that made her remember. She hadn’t meant to forget, but the whole thing had happened in the dead of winter, so what else was she supposed to do?
Another bone chilling scream came from the other room and she remembered that it had happened the winter before last, too. The goosebumps of surprise on her skin took her back to the day it had happened – well, days it had happened, as they had really both died in similar ways, hadn’t they? She could remember the twisted limbs, the blood and hair stuck to the bars of the cage she had kept first one and then the other in for months. The shock of finding each one gone so soon, before she could really have some fun with them.
With a sigh of regret, she got up off the couch and went to the kitchen to face the music.
“Calm down, Mum,” she said from the doorway. Her mother was hyperventilating by the dishwasher, forgotten trays of freezer-burnt meat piled in the sink beside her, already wearing frosty fur-coats in the humid summer air.
“Why are there two dead bodies in my freezer?”, her mother exclaimed between wheezes.
“Well,” she said, “I couldn’t bury them in January, could I?” She reached into the back of the freezer and picked up the two Ziploc bags.
“Well, you get those hamsters out of my kitchen this minute! Out to the back garden with you and bury them deep enough that the cat can’t get to them again.”
“Yes, Mum,” she said, heading for the screen door. “Sheesh, you’d think I’d stored a human head in there or something…”
Charter of Writes 