little girl, your kitten has died

no dinner, some PBR & Bombay, a ginger cookie or three

At a family gathering at my parents' house. Some little girl second cousin is there, probabl 3 or 4. She has 2 kittens, one boy who is a bit older and very rambunctious, the other a girl and very small and shaky. It's time for bed, I sit with my little cousin until she goes to sleep. The boy kitten is off somewhere, the girl is there but won't stay in bed with her. I leave and go into the kitchen and then on into the adjoining fast food place. Another cousin, teenage, fat, comes in in a few minutes and says, "Well, one of the kittens is dead, and you'll never guess which one." We all scamper back into the house. The little boy kitten got his claws caught in a bedspread and his claws ripped out and then he fell and broke bones and died. We wake up the little cousin to tell her [why would you do that?]; she begins a prolonged session of piercing screams.

I go out into the lego land style lego workshops set up. Long, low tables coated in blue lego sheeting, lots of lego bits to play with and construct. Then it turns from legos into a machine shop of some sort, but still with long, low tables, now piled with tools. The environment is greasy and dirty, walls of ramshackle bleached old wood planks cobbled together. A guy about my age comes up and challenges me. I can't turn him down, honor and all.

He goes off to pick his weapon, I simply choose a hammer. (The black handled hammer from dad's garage.) I can catch bird's eye camera glimpses of him, he's chosen a knife, but has attached "steels" to it, as someone around me says, which means that he has attached a long wood and metal handle to his knife. Oh crap. He comes back, we begin to fight. His range is obviously a problem, but then I realize that his knife has a polyhedral knob on the tip, and the edges aren't really sharp. I concentrate on grasping the blade when he lunges, so that I can yank him to me and bring my hammer to bear. It's frightening, but it's working.