Every Sunday Dad goes out to the market and comes back with a piece of pork. My job was to slice it into thin piece before cooking it. I watch the thick piece of meat hanging at the kitchen door. In the sun its surface had started to dry out. I could smell it. It was a piece of raw flesh, and the smell, however bad it might be to some, was heavenly for me. I always looked forward to Sunday, to market day, when meat was available to us. I looked at it as if I was revering it. I'd never been to the section in the market where the pigs were slaughtered and whose parts were sold. I never avoided it, but I never got the curiosity to visit that section. I had seen fishermen sell fishes, and also snakes, frogs, eels, and other creatures they had caught or farmed. But never the pork. I've seen poultry, including little ones that farmers bought to raise. I've even been to the buffalo butcher. But pig butcher, I wasn't sure if it even existed. But it must have because every Sunday there was a piece coming back, and we all treated it like gold.
It wasn't time yet to start slicing the meat. It was hanging there because it was the only place with a hook, and we didn't want to leave it lying around. The reason was hiding somewhere. I looked around. There were many small hiding places where the enemy could be hiding, biding its time, ignoring its own hunger. I had never actually seen the cat. My Mother had tried to set traps using fish scrap, but it never bought it. We knew it existed somewhere because there had been at least two occasions when the meat, left on the counter, disappeared without a trace. It was humiliating and depressing to lose a whole piece of meat to a cat. That time we couldn't buy more meat even if we had the money; we had ration stamps that set basically a quota on how much we could consume.
I shooed away some big, iridescently green flies that started to enjoy the smell of this flesh in the sun as much as I did. I found a shady spot near the front entrance and sat on the floor. I looked around, wondering where the cat could be. I suppose it was a very clever cat then, having eluded the whole neighborhood's efforts to trap it. It had been stealing food a lot, and I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't spend more time chasing mice, of which we had many here.
I started to fall asleep in the early afternoon sun. I was trying not to doze off, guarding and admiring the meat as much as I was capable of. I turned to look at the TV tube that my uncle had extracted from a broken TV and converted it to an aquarium. In it I had some colorful fish. I looked down and saw in a red bucket next to the aquarium were two helpless turtles that tried as much as they wanted to get out of their state. They weren't pets; my Dad knew the fish guy that spends most of day fishing and trapping aquatic creatures. These were even more special than the meat and they would be part of a soup. I didn't really care for it; the soup tasted strange and I preferred to have the meat.
I turned to look at the kitchen again, and for a second I had this vision that the meat was gone. My heart raced like a madman for a split second. But the sun's rays had shifted and the meat was no longer in the shade. That was why I missed it for a moment. I would be in such trouble if the meat had disappeared. I was always getting into some trouble, and being incompetent and letting the cat steal the meat would be a big deal.
The gate into this community was heard open and shut. I stood up and walked to the walkway to see if it was my Dad returning. But suddenly I saw a flash of a shadow, a light brown shadow, from the corner of the kitchen, disappearing somewhere behind the doors. There were many places to hide in this place that didn't have much to offer, no pipes, no storage boxes, nothing. But I knew what it was. The stealth that caught me by surprise. I looked up and was relieved again to see that the meat was still there. The thief had come really close this time. I have never seen a cat, but I was not entirely sure if a cat could jump up high enough to reach the piece of meat. There was nowhere else to hang the meat, so I just waited. Finally, my Dad was here, he would figure everything out!
