Do Tampons Take Your Virginity?: A Catholic Girl's Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

started mutilating insects. I tortured earthworms, spiders, and other small creatures. I would light a match and hold the earthworm against the match. It would squirm, and a mucous-like substance would come out of the worm. Then I would light another match and hold the earthworm against the flame until it was dead. I did this for a few years. I never graduated to larger animals.
    Thankfully, I fell in love with my grandmother’s cats. She always had at least one or two cats living at the house. I loved them. I remember a little gray tabby female named “Princess.” She was so beautiful and affectionate. She purred so loudly that you could hear it in the other room.
    I begged my father for a dog or a cat. The answer was always no. I wasn’t even allowed to have a goldfish.
    He’d say, “Forget it! It’s more shit for me to pick up!”
    I guess I just wanted a friend.
    Father wasn’t completely averse to animal ownership. He liked birds. Many people in our hometown had pigeon coops and others kept chickens. My grandfather had about ten chickens in a coop down by the creek. Sometimes we went down to the creek and fed them corn.
    I thought the chickens were gross. The coop always smelled like shit and the hens pecked at each other all the time.
    Father raised birds when he was a child. He had pigeons and doves, which he trained to eat from his hands and return when he whistled.
    Father told me a story about his birds. One day, he noticed that some of his pigeons had disappeared. He suspected a neighborhood cat, so he hid in the bushes for three days, waiting for the cat to appear. On the third day, a scraggly male tabby crept out and started inching his way toward my father’s pigeon coop.
    “I didn’t even breathe,” my father said.
    “I tiptoed behind the cat and hit it with a stick. It screamed one time only! I kept hitting the cat until there was no cat left! When I was done, it was only a bloody smear on the rocks.” He shook his fist and curled his tongue in his mouth—something that he did when he was angry.
    He savored this memory and told it to me often.
    We moved to a new house when I was eleven. The house was almost complete, but the lot behind the house was overgrown with weeds and tall grass. One day, my brother and I found a little green parakeet in the grass. It was tame. I caught it with my bare hands and took the bird to my father. He was delighted.
    He immediately went out and got a cage for the bird. He bought bird seed and a little white calcium rock for the bird to sharpen its beak. My father’s overall mood seemed to improve. He enjoyed the bird and would stare at it in the afternoon when he was done with his projects.
    A week later, my father painted the interior of the house and left the bird inside. It was dead at the bottom of the cage the next day, overcome by paint fumes.
    Father was upset. He wrapped the bird carefully in tissue and put him in a little box. Then he put the box in a coffee can. My father buried the can in the backyard. He stood over the bird’s grave site for a very long time. I watched him; he just stood there with his shoulders hunched, a shovel in his right hand.
    That was the first and last time we owned a bird or any other pet.
    When I finally left home to go to college, several friends and I rented a small apartment. For the first time in my life, I was living with people who weren’t my family. For some reason, we never had pets, but I always wanted a cat.
    The first week I was able to afford my own apartment, I went to the county animal shelter. My apartment complex didn’t allow pets, but I didn’t care. I was finally going to have a cat. That was it.
    I didn’t make it to the animal shelter in time. They had already closed and it was dark outside. I stood in the parking lot for a long time, staring at the surrender cages outside. The sounds coming from the cages were heartbreaking. I realized that I wasn’t alone in the darkness. An old Rottweiler sat