They were burning beef in their backyards, brown burly men with beer cans. I was always petrified to talk to them. Not because of their color or anything like that. It was more this foreboding vibe they gave off. It was like seeing a car in front of you swerving and changing lanes dangerously often. You just can't help but worry that something is happening in that car. Something terrible. It wasn't that I thought they seemed like bad people, menaces to the neighborhood... it was that the way they acted and never seemed to *look* at anything or speak a real word... they didn't even seem like people at all. Like, if there was any trace of humanity in them in the beginning... it had left so long ago that they had forgotten what it was like to have it.And when I happened to catch them on a walk out of the neighborhood last week, following them them far behind on my bike, I saw them do something I can never forget, even when I close my eyes. In fact, closing my eyes leave me only with those millisecond nightmares for my subconscious to feast upon. Sometimes we can only feast on that which our mind tells us not to. We are as compulsive as animals and just as easy to catch. People sometimes forget about how similar we are to animals. I never will again.