Easter Kittens

It’s hard to know just when the truth of the day made its impact on his young mind. It was Easter morning, and the excitement of this special morning had Tommy preoccupied. He was looking forward to getting dressed in his finest clothes and seeing all his friends at church that morning. He was excited in anticipation of all the upcoming events of that sunny Easter day, so the first clues that might have eased him into the shock of the life altering events that were about to unfold went unnoticed. Tommy could never have imagined that anything wrong could ever happen on such a beautiful and important day. Easter Sunday was a happy day; this was the day, so many years ago, that Jesus had risen from the dead, and surely God would not allow anything bad to happen on this day!

But Tommy's fear was growing . . . He felt it in his heart first, that tightening in the chest with a feeling of dread that something in the world was not right—but he couldn’t explain the feeling; it was undefined, unseen. He was suddenly frightened, but of what he didn’t exactly know. It began early that Easter morning when, as he did on most mornings, Tommy followed Mamaw to the chicken house to collect eggs and feed the chickens. They stopped off at the meat house, a small building where the chicken feed was kept.

That’s when the real fear began.