You Have Been Warned
Someone left a dead squirrel on our front step the other night. I walked out to catch some air around 10 P.M. and saw it lying there. It had been dead for days, maybe even weeks. Its legs were stuck solid, its body stiff like a Popsicle stick or a piece of frozen fish. What does it mean? Is it a sign of impending doom? Is it a warning from some unknown foe, someone I mistakenly offended during the run of my day? Leaving a dead animal on someone’s front step is almost biblical in a way. John 4:20 – He who spends the night cleaning his apartment listening to John Coltrane will heed the wrath of nature’s nut gatherers.
I must admit, I’m kind of weirded out by the whole thing. I mean, it’s not often you step outside to find a dead rodent on your stoop and its probably even less common for someone to just happen by and have one fall unassumingly out of their knapsack, right? Someone had to have found it, picked it up and decided to leave it where I found it. Either that or it had died high up in a tree and just now decided to fall to the ground. That could have happened I suppose but what are the chances of that? Seriously. Either way, it was a bit of a shock to find. Strangely enough, earlier that night while I was cleaning, I looked at the snow shovel leaning against the wall by the front door and thought maybe it was time I put it away but I decided against it seconds later. Good thing I did. There might not be any snow left to clear off the step but dead animals, yup, we got ‘em.
