25 August 2006

Fresh Meat

One of the many nice things about my street is that it is lined with trees. Lately people seem to have been trying to outdo each other by building ever nicer wooden borders around the tree in front of their house, and someone down at the end of the block recently completed the poshest tree box yet, involving numerous pieces of quality lumber and rising at least a couple feet above the sidewalk.

Possibly someone didn't appreciate his efforts, though, or perhaps there is a stranger or more morbid explanation, but when I walked past today, two hind quarters of some indeterminate animal were sitting there atop the box. Had they come from a butcher shop, or did they belong to a neighborhood dog that had gotten on somebody's nerves one too many times? It was impossible to tell, though it did look like good enough quality meat that I was halfway surprised no one had picked it up, washed it off, and served it to their family for dinner.

I was even more surprised that it didn't appear to have been touched by any of the neighborhood's four-legged creatures, including dogs, rats, or the half dozen cats that appear to live in the front garden of the library. Maybe it hadn't been sitting there that long, I reasoned, but then on the other hand, it had clearly been there long enough for someone to leave a yellow Post-it note next to it saying, "You dropped something."


Wesley said...

Odd. It's not the kind of thing you just sit down for a moment and forget where you put it.

Possibly, one of your hipster-cum-cynic neighbours won a meat raffle in a bout of camp folly, only to have the ironic punchline delivered when the spoils were awarded to his/her vegetarian self.

Chelsea said...

Maybe it says "you dropped something" because whoever wrote that figured someone dropped it on accident..like a grocery?

tim said...

The Post-It bandit strikes again.

That's brilliant. I should have thought of that years ago.