Giggles loves tall grass. I hate tall grass. I don’t know why. Maybe it was when Dad yelled at Teresa, my older sister, when she hadn’t cut the lawn in like 10 straight days. Lawn mowing was Teresa’s job, Mom paid her a whole $20 dollars a week to do it, no lyin‘. I thought that was so unfair. Mom even paid her when she skipped a week. Dad always tells her if she doesn’t cut the grass the farm will be overrun with mosquitoes.

     Mosquitoes! That’s why I hate tall grass. Mosquitoes are the worst. Mosquitoes and scratchy plants on the skin. Don’t you hate it when you’re baling hay and you get all sweaty and the straw begins to stick to the back of your neck and you start to itch and then your whole body starts to itch, not because there is straw on it but more because you think there is straw on it? And you look at your watch and it’s only 2:00 pm and you know you have to put up with a sweaty, itchy body for like three more hours or more. Man that’s the worst times ten.

     I hate tall grass and weeds and straw and most specifically prickly vegetation. You know like thistle and cockle-burs. Straw makes my skin itch and thistle stings and poison ivy burns. You’d think I’d despise plant life which is not true at all. I like watermelons, cucumbers, radishes (with salt always with salt), sweet corn from the garden and sunflower seeds. Even though when Mr. Larson planted a field of sunflowers two years ago there were so many bees. Way too many bees. If you don’t annoy them they leave you alone but man sometimes they're just too many to contend with. I even like tomatoes. The only other person in my family who likes tomatoes are my Mom and my late Grandfather Bjorn. He even taught me to sprinkle sugar on em’. It’s really good, no lyin’.

     And then the mosquitoes. Usually they’re not so bad, but after a good rain you can’t even go outside. It only takes a few seconds before I get so many bites that I know I will be looking forward to a mostly sleepless night. I itch so much that I get bumps all over my body and it looks like chiggers. Don’t get me wrong chiggers are far worse; those things get under your skin and tickle your nerves for days, but I only get those when I’m swimming and only when my family goes swimming at Square Lake.

     Giggles is my cat. Actually his full name is Mister Giggles but that gets exhausting, as Teresa says. I should have just named him Giggles to start with but that was when I was young and foolish. Yeah, I can pretty confidently say Giggles is the only one in the family who likes tall grass. Mom says his long fur makes him immune from the mosquitoes. That makes sense, although it wouldn’t explain why the other two cats, Maurice and the Black Cat, tend to avoid the treacherous back yard. ‘Treacherous’ sounds like an exaggeration but it pretty much tells the story. Or at least begins to tell the story. Actually, to a cat it’s like a jungle. You know, like Southern Hemisphere jungle. Amazon or Africa, take your pick.

     Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah the three cats. One of the cats is called ‘Maurice’. We just call the third cat the Black Cat, pretty ironic huh? Especially considering all three are mostly the color ‘black’. What’s funny is that they’re all black except the Black Cat. He’s got a white face and paws. The vet referred to him as a Tuxedo cat, which I assume is because he looks like he’s wearing one. On the other hand, mom has trouble telling Giggles and Maurice apart, she has to pick ’em up to tell the difference. Giggles has a thin stripe of white fur on his stomach and Maurice has one lone white whisker and a tiny notch on his ear; all three have the same length of fur and large muscular builds. I mean, they’re not pro football player muscular. Hell, not even college player muscular. Don’t get me wrong, they’re chubby here and there but overall they’re pretty strong, I mean they are farm cats after all. Although I would say Maurice is more of an indoor cat. He rarely goes outside and when he does it’s only for a very short time. Maurice tends to sleep all day and then only awakens when Mom comes home from work. He follows her around like a lap dog. I think that’s why Dad calls him a Momma’s boy. He’s got real soft fur too, not like Giggles or the Black Cat. I think that’s why mom likes him so much. He considers himself entitled that way.

     Grammy says our cats are docile. I guess that’s a compliment. At least that’s the way I took it. Uncle Pete’s cat is pretty wild, even though that cat is a house cat. He calls him Wilson. Giggles can’t stand him; chases him all over the place. Pete makes real good homemade pizza and he always jokes to my mom, “I’ll trade you one ‘Wilson’ for a ‘Maurice’ or a ‘Giggles’ plus a pizza that will be made later.” Dad says he’d make that trade in a heartbeat.

     I, myself, have nothing against Maurice. He’s not a wimp. I mean, you’d think an indoor cat would not be much of a hunter but in the fall we have our yearly infestation of field mice just after harvest, Maurice bags more mice than any other cat, even more than Giggles; a fact that my big brother Seth takes great joy in pointing out to me all year long. I only take minor offense to it because Giggles is mine, had him since he was a kitten when my parents best friends, Mr. & Mrs. Hornick, gave him to me as a birthday present.

     I always defend Giggles, suggesting the reason he doesn’t hunt down that many mice in the fall is because he has had his fill of outdoor rodents all summer. I mean, no one really knows how many he’s captured out in the wild. Although I do know when he’s nabbed one. It’s not hard to figure out, he has this really gross habit of catching striped gophers and eating the heads off ‘em. I’ve never seen him catch one and I must say catching a gopher must be really tough because those things are really fast. The only reason I know he can do it is because I’ve seen him licking the wound of a headless gopher a number of times. But I don’t want you to think Giggles is a bully, far from it. He’s pretty friendly. A lot of cats will scratch you when you play with them. Giggles is different; he has this nifty habit of pulling back his claws when I hold him. And if you’re familiar with cats the first thing they want to do is sink their daggers into your flesh, no matter how well meaning they are. He even pulls back his claws when he’s trying to wake me up in the morning. I push him away like three times before I am awake enough to get my ass out of bed. He will touch his paw on my cheek, never with his claws. When that doesn’t work he invariably goes right for my nose. The feeling of Giggles’ sandpaper tongue scraping my snout is no big deal. Hey, I’m a farm kid, I can sleep through anything. But what I can’t tolerate is Mister Giggle’s morning breath. Oh Man! His mouth stinks like a cross between a stale jug of milk and a rancid minnow bucket. No lyin’. When that scent hits my nose it gets me out of the sack faster than any alarm clock. Really man, it’s like misery times ten.

     And the tall grass in the backyard. Giggles loves the tall grass if for no other reason than to hunt the birds. Sparrows, black birds, robins; they hate his guts, swooping down on him in a vain attempt to attack him from the air. The other two cats, Maurice and the Black Cat, hate those birds bearing down on ‘em. I think that’s when they generally avoid the circus of the backyard lawn. Giggles, on the other hand, loves to taunt the birds. He especially relishes it when the grass is an inch or two taller than normal so he can hide before leaping up with his outstretched paws in a desperate attempt to swipe at ‘em.

     Of course you have to understand, in those instances Giggles is generally mistaken or at least severely delusional. He doesn’t “hide” from the birds. The birds know he is hiding in the grass. How could they not miss a big black log of a cat in the midst of a lush green meadow? I mean, the birds swoop down upon him because they can see him. The birds consider him an enemy, fearful he will attack their nests. Giggles, on the other hand, thinks he is playing a trick on the angry fowl, when in reality the birds are trying to attack him.

     Do you want to know the funny thing about it? Even though Giggles is a great hunter, I never saw him once catch one of those birds. Never even seen him eat a dead bird carcass. No lyin’. Maybe he just likes to play with ‘em. You know, maybe he isn’t using his claws to take fruitless swipes at the buzzards; like when he plays with me or when he tries in vain to wake me up with his retracted claws. Don’t get me wrong, Giggles can really annoy you from time to time. I mean aside from his bad breath. Like when I go to the bathroom to take a whiz he’ll hear me and then come runnin’ down the hallway and stick his head right into the toilet bowl. Right down in there, like something important was happening. Man, I hate that. Nothing worse than having to give a cat a shower, especially several times a day; you learn to keep the bathroom door closed in a real fast hurry. Giggles doesn’t do it much anymore, but for a time Seth took great joy in purposely leaving the bathroom door open and then screaming out to me, “Hey Shithead, I pissed on your cat again.” And then he always follows it up, “Your cat is so sick and demented. Yes sir, Shithead’s perverted cat loves the golden shower.” Seth is such a prick.

     Anyway, I was thinking about Giggles in the backyard but then I realized I wasn’t so much as thinking about him as I was watching him. I was actually thinking about something else. Not an idea but a name. And not a person so much as a voice of a name, ‘Laura’. It had been running through my head the past few days and I couldn’t figure out what it was. At least until now. It was from a movie. Seth stumbled on to a box of old VHS movie tapes that my parents had stored in a closet. He did a Google search on the movies and realized one was highly rated for sex and violence. I checked it out on the internet myself just a bit ago. It was called ‘Fire Walk with Me’. I remember sitting down to watch it, Mom and Dad didn’t know we found it and Seth was pretty pumped to see it. Although he lost interest rather quickly after it started and left to go to his room. Teresa, she’s my older sister, she seemed into it and watched the whole thing. I would have quit watching it too but I was bored. The sex scenes weren’t as cool as I thought it would be. I mean, it was interesting in a kinky sort of way but you could see much better online. To be honest, I thought the movie sucked and I had forgotten about it until a few days ago when that voice popped into my head: “Laura”.

     In the movie this girl, Laura, is into some really crazy shit. I mean, she’s heavy into drugs and she’s into a lot of sex with a bunch of different people and the funny thing is, is that she is really hot. She’s not fried and brain dead like the meth-tweens, that’s a clique at the High School. I see them once in a while roaming around downtown, everybody calls them the meth-tweens. Even the meth-tweens call themselves the meth-tweens as if it were a badge of honor. They’re real scary lookin’, they’re kinda like Goths but Goths are healthier. Anyway, ‘Laura’ is into all this shit and she knows she’s going down a bad path and she’s got this boyfriend named ‘James’. He’s like really worried about her. It reminded me about people who are always saying how much they love each other. You know how they are. Teresa does that shit all the time, especially when she’s on the phone: “I love you” “Love you” “Loves to You“. ‘Loves to You’, that’s one of Betheny’s trademarks. Beth is Teresa’s Beftie (’Beftie‘ is what Teresa calls her BFF‘s). Says it endlessly. Mom does it too, so do all the girls at school. Even guys do it, but it’s usually in the movies or to their parents in the confines of their home. They say it so much that it’s lost all its meaning, you know? James would tell Laura he loves her too, except he really meant it. He wasn’t fake like that.

     So anyway this voice has been in my head like all week and it’s been driving me nuts! All I hear is the word ‘Laura’ ringing in my head all the time and I don’t know what to make of it. The funny thing is that it’s spoken in Laura’s voice. The scene in the movie where she says it happens towards the end. This guy James suspects Laura is destroying herself and he tells her he is worried about her and he’s trying to get her attention so he says her name in an empathetic, concerned tone. Laura responds by rolling her eyes and then repeating, “Laura,” in a mocking way, like she was making fun of James for saying it. It’s not just the name itself, it’s the way she says it, “Laura”; as if she’s taunting him. Why is it still in my head? Jesus, I had only seen the movie that one time.

     The thing that has been gnawing at me is that voice. You know, Laura’s voice replying sarcastically, “Laura”. It was as if she was laughing at him for expressing concern. Then suddenly she hits him in the face for no reason. Strange, right? Then he tells her, “You always hurt the ones you love.” and then she says, “You mean the ones you pity.” It’s such a bizarre thing to recall. I mean, why would I remember that? It was annoying me so much that I had to re-watch the movie again. I had to do it before my parents came home from work; they’re weird about that kinda shit, you know what I’m sayin’? Something I noticed was that although James had his suspicions, he had no idea about all the crazy shit Laura was into. Really in the dark. (Or was he?) And after watching it the second time I felt real sick. No lyin’, man, I felt physically ill. But still, I don’t get the connection. Seriously, I’m not even remotely like her. I don’t even have any friends who are like that. I can’t even believe the meth-tweens are like her. It’s weird, why, of all things, did that voice pop into my head and why I can’t get it out? Like I said, I didn’t even like the stupid movie. I mean, it amazes me that I stuck around to watch it until the end. The thing that really befuddles me, is why did I remember ‘Laura’ and what’s it all have to do with anything?