death

when my first goldfish died, my mom flushed him down the toilet. when i asked her where he would end up, she said heaven. about an hour later, she found me screaming into the toilet, "hello?...god..please take good care of my fishy!"

Cherry

When I was little I had a pet gerbil, and gerbils don't seem to live that long........so my gerbil would die then somehow it would be back a few days later. This went on for years. I thought it was the damnedest thing that these animals died and then returned to life after a couple days, and that only I seemed to know this. One time my friend's hamster died and she was heartbroken, so I told her to get a gerbil cuz they're just like hamsters, except they come back from the dead. It wasn't till much later that I relized my dad had just been replacing the gerbils before he thought I'd notice it was gone.

Rae

The nature of bats intrigued me so much: "How could an animal that is not a bird fly?" Until the day I realized that when mice died they became bats.

Júlio De Marco

I had an ant farm when I was a child. Somehow I managed to name most of the ants, as if I could tell them apart. One of the ants got caught on the little green plastic bridge when I poured the ants into the ant farm. He stayed on the bridge all the time, never moving, so I named him Lazy. I didn't realize he was dead until the other ants dragged him off and "buried" him a week later.

Anon

my family's cat, tyronne, died when my sister was 5. my parents burried him under the big evergreen in our backyard. for years my sister thought that tyronne was just walking around under the ground in the backyard--that being dead meant that you lived underground. when we had moles that pushed up the yard, she thought that was evidence that tyronne was playing and jumping up!

christine

At a dinner party we were talking about childhood pets, when my mother told about how her cat had become to old to live at home anymore and had gone to live in a home for retired cats, this had happened when she was quite young (about 10).

As the story was told she suddenly realised that the cat had, in reality been taken to the vet and put down.

The sudden realisation that she had never mourned her precious childhood pet dawned on her and she collapsed in tears, as the 30 years of mistake became clear!

aethel

When I was about 9 or 10 I had a goldfish that I won at the school carnival. One morning I woke up and found that the fish had jumped out of it's bowl onto the floor and died. I ran into the other room where my brother (younger) and father were seated watching cartoons and asked what happened. Upon examination my father convinced both my brother and I that the fish commited suicide after seeing my brother's face earlier that morning. We still laugh about it even today.

gullible in MN

I used to believe that semi trucks pulling pigs for slaughter were just the farmer taking the pigs for a ride on the expressway.

Alexandra

When i was younger i used to go and visit my grandmother on her farm. Every time we went there my brother and i used to get bought a duckling. When i asked my Grandma where the ducks from last time had gone she would tell me that the fox had got them. From this i'd somehow assumed that this fox had taken the ducks to live on his own farm. it wasnt until i asked my grandma why we couldn't just go to the foxes farm and take them back that i found out the sad truth...

anon

When my cat, Shadow, died of a tail infection when I was four, I was so sad that I drew thirteen pictures just for him and told my dad to mail the pictures to Heaven so that Shadow could see them. This was a yearlong hobby, until I found out that Heaven doesn't have a mailbox.

Marshmello Da Strawberry Cow