Catz

“Skinning cats is hard!”

That comment caused him to raise an eyebrow, similar in fashion to a certain Vulcan science officer when they were surprised.

He looked toward the door to the lunchroom, where he had heard the unusual comment. Seated at a table roughly ten feet away was a trio of individuals. There were other tables spread about the lunchroom and certainly there were multiple conversations ongoing during this lunch hour.

He felt that maybe he had misheard the comment.

There was a good chance that it had merely been a mondegreen.

One of his favorites of that phenomena had always been “racked up like a douche, another loner in the night.” That most famous of misheard lyrics was of course “wrapped up like a deuce, another motor in the night.”

He honestly was not sure who had made the off-hand comment at that table. He was even uncertain as to whether the speaker was male or female.

The three individuals were different from each other. He supposed that could be said of each and every person on the planet. Even identical twins, though they may be the same in appearance, will usually have differing personalities and or beliefs.

But these three persons were markedly different.

His attention was on them due to the comment he had overheard and a possible concern or suspicion.

He was a great fan of statistics; and knew that there was basically no chance that one of the trio at the lunch table was really dangerous.

One of the three was a white male, probably in his early thirties. The other male was an African American gentleman, likely in his forties. The third person at the table was an attractive female, with a Mediterranean look about her. He would have guessed her age somewhere around thirty.

He had been on a kick of late; watching true crime dramas and documentaries. He had been fascinated with the histories and exploits of certain individuals: Gacy, Holmes, Dahmer, and the like.

He had also noticed that the true crime thing seemed to be an obsession of many a lady these days, but they spoke to him on a different level than others he supposed.

The comment drew his attention, or maybe concern would be a better word. This due to the fact that supposedly certain behaviors were an indicator that a person was more likely to engage in some unsavory conduct.

He knew that some of the preconceptions that people had about those things were probably untrue. Just because someone wet the bed when they were young did not mean that they would turn into a disturbed individual.

He himself had been a frequent bed-wetter up till he was almost a teenager.

The same could be said about kids that liked to play with fire.

He had his hand on his pocket and could feel the outline of a book of matches that he habitually carried. This despite that fact that he was not a smoker.

The comment about “skinning cats” could indicate a penchant or desire to be cruel to small animals. Now while this behavior was definitely not “right”, it didn’t necessarily mean that the individual would progress from mistreating small creatures to larger animals, and eventually even to people.

He continued to listen to the trio as he pondered the strange comment that had drawn his attention to the table. He didn’t want to be obvious, so he couldn’t just stare at the group as they had their lunch.

He could hear them sharing stories about classes that they had taken in high school and college. The comment was starting to make a sort of sense to him.

He had also taken some of the courses that the trio were sharing experiences over. But he did have other experiences outside of an academic setting that he was fairly certain the three of them did not have.

Studying the three individuals, he felt that he could make some assumptions based on certain statistics with which he was somewhat familiar.

He felt that the most likely person of the three individuals to have made the statement, and to possibly be guilty of any sort of aberrant behavior was the white male.

He was aware that a majority of serial killers were predominantly white males. There had been some females and some black ones, but roughly 70 percent of them had historically been white males. So it made sense for him to make that assumption. Even though he knew it was mathematically silly to make that assumption.

The trio had continued with their shared conversation as their lunch had gone on. It turns out that a pair of them, both the men, had taken several biology, and anatomy classes in high school and college.

He overheard the white male speculating that skinning cats was hard because the feline cadavers he had dissected in class had been embalmed of course; and had come out of a freezer.

He knew there were other factors that could contribute to a difficulty in skinning cats, and other things.

So, the mystery was cleared up to his satisfaction. The three individuals were simply average workers at lunch.

He didn’t know how they had come up with the number or statistic; but he had read somewhere that the odds of running across a serial killer were close to three and a half billion to one. Those kinds of odds were hard for one to conceptualize.

If you were to meet one person every second, it would take nearly one hundred and five years to fulfill those odds.

The two men and the attractive woman cleared up their trays and left; he assumed they were going back to work.

With the table empty he was able to see across the lunchroom, and to view himself in the mirrored wall across from him.

There wasn’t much about him that stood out. He looked like many other white male, aged twenty five to forty.

He smiled as he thought about the odds. He knew the unlikelihood of there being a serial killer in this lunchroom.

His eyebrow raised slightly as he thought about the likelihood of there being two.

He cleared up his tray and as he deposited it with the other empty trays, he said in a low voice; “skinning cats is hard!”