That was the time he stopped believing in armadillos. Irrational you may say and a psychiatrist would probably have more than that to say on the matter, but that was how it was. It happened when he was eight; he'd read about armadillos in a book and something about them had just caught his imagination. His parents had had another one of their major blow out fights and were doing their guilty, happy family routine, so it was a tense day at the zoo. He was so excited about seeing the armadillos, he was hurrying his parents along the paths towards their enclosure; they were speaking in low, tight voices as they followed behind him. They finally reached the enclosure and he ran up to the glass, pressing his face against it, searching. He looked and looked through that glass, peering into every corner of the enclosure as his parents voices got louder and louder behind him.
"It's not there" he said quietly, to himself, unheard over the shouting behind him. And it was right then, in that moment, seeing his reflection looking back at him in the glass, he just knew. He knew his parents would separate, as they did a month later and proceeded to have a very nasty and messy divorce. It was like he saw a premonition of his future life, living with his Mother who became increasingly depressed and was less and less able to cope, with weekends with his Father, in theory, except that his Father gave more and more excuses as to why he couldn't take him until finally he just stopped seeing him at all. In high school there would be petty crime, graffiti, shop lifting... Then as he got a bit older, dabbling in drugs and drinking too much, just like his Mother. Then his semi-nomadic lifestyle, never staying in one place long, drifting around the country, always thinking there's got to be somewhere better than 'insert the name of whatever town he'd been living in a few months here.'
It was as if he sensed all this, at eight years old, standing in front of that apparently empty enclosure, listening to his parents yelling, and he felt a sudden anger welling up inside him until he suddenly yelled "There's no such thing as armadillos!" and ran away down the path.
For whatever reason, in years to come that opinion stuck with him, though he never mentioned it to anyone, including himself. But it just stayed there, somewhere in the back of his mind, and sayings like "Prove it! I've never seen/heard that, and why should I believe you?" became commonplace for him.
That is, until one day around his 29th birthday, when he'd picked up and suddenly left another town and failed relationship number 'I've stopped counting' behind him and was just driving in the early morning, somewhere along the Texas and New Mexico border. He had no destination in mind, and very little else in his mind either at that moment, just staring out in front of him, when something moved on the road, just up ahead. He pressed down hard on the breaks, swerved to the right and caught the sandy shoulder, sending him veering right off the road and to a screeching halt in some brush.
He looked back to the road and watched the armadillo that had stopped him, as it safely reached the other side.
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