My Aunt Was Literally A Murderer

And nobody cared but me

Trigger Warning — If you’re an ardent cat lover this true story may cause a few unsettling feelings.

Although I’m sixty-seven now, the events of that day are burned into my memory. I will never forget what my aunt did that day, how she took the lives of four souls without shedding a single tear of remorse.

After confronting my aunt about this horrific murder, I tried to tell everyone else, but it seemed no one cared about the atrocity but me.

My aunt had come to live with us when I was eight years old, far too young to really understand the nuances of what a nasty divorce was. All I knew at that age was that my mom’s sister was going to be staying with us for a bit.

Which was okay with me. With her there, it meant she got the chauffeur duties during schooltime, ferrying my brother and me each morning and picking us up each afternoon.

Again a pretty sweet deal, especially since I’d gotten kicked off the school bus for a particularly unpleasant incident between one of the bus bullies and me.

The morning of the murders was bitterly cold, a brutal winter storm had passed through during the night and dropped the temperatures to well below freezing. That morning the blustery winds sent chilling shards of cold through you regardless of the number of layers of clothing you wore.

And as she usually did on days such as these, my aunt walked out of the back of the house from the kitchen to start the car and let it warm up.

Standing in the kitchen, helping mom prepare lunches for my brother and me, I watched as my aunt walked back into the kitchen. Her face had a drawn and worried look, and she grabbed my mother’s arm and pulled her away.

At first, I didn’t pay any attention, but then I heard my aunt say four words and the world as I knew it fell away from underneath my feet.

The kittens are dead.

My kittens. The kittens from an old mama cat who’d given birth to them in our barn out back and then abandoned them. The kittens I’d been caring for. The ones I’d created a place for in the barn and checked on them every day when I got home from school.

My kittens were dead.

Because the winter storm had been so brutally cold and I hadn’t been prepared for it, my four kittens sought out the only warmth they could find. And that happened to be the engine block of our old car.

Yes, I should have been more prepared, but what eight-year-old has the presence of mind to continually investigate weather reports?

I rushed outside, forgetting to don a jacket, ignoring the bitter winds, and fell to my knees. There they were, hacked to death by the fan, bloodied and lifeless.

Moaning in horrified disbelief, I scooped three of them up and clutched them to my chest, ignoring the blood staining my shirt, remnants of torn flesh, and fur matting against my hands.

And then I saw the fourth kitten. He’d escaped the brutal execution from the fan blades, but as my aunt had rolled the car back to see what had made all the racket in the engine, a front car tire had run over him and mashed his fragile little body.

Blood was trickling from his mouth.

I picked him up, and cuddling all four I whirled about and ran into the house. For several minutes I stood in the kitchen screaming at my aunt, calling her a murderer, telling her I would never forget what she did.

She never even said she was sorry.

That weekend, and following a touching funeral service behind the barn attended by only me and a shovel, I tried to speak with my parents about what my aunt had done.

None of the family seemed to care that my aunt was a murderer. They always changed the subject and told me to forget about it, telling me sometimes things just happen.

Yeah, like my aunt murdering my four kittens.

I have no idea why this memory came back to haunt me this morning, but it did. And now, as I did then, I feel a tightening in my chest and a lump of sorrow building in my throat.

At the time, I believed murderers were an unconscionable lot, and that she heartlessly destroyed my kittens with malice.

My aunt has long since passed away, and I don’t know for sure if this memory of mine, which she unwittingly became a part of, has remained with her as it has with me.

As an adult, I understand what happened, but when I go back to that time and moment; when I become that eight-year-old child in my memory once again, I wonder about it sometimes. I wonder whether or not she felt sorry for what happened.

Perhaps she did. I guess I’ll never know.

Thank you so much for reading. You didn’t have to, but I’m certainly glad you did.

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© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.