| Last Thursday night, we moved his rotting body. He lay there lifeless, yet I still saw something in his unblinking eyes that reminded me of what he had once been. We agreed that we would miss him, but it was one of those things that had to be done. The time to shed tears was over, and now was the time for action. In fact, the stench of him had been so overwhelming that the night before he had drawn all manner of insects to feast upon his softened flesh. Any longer and our neighbors would start asking questions. The overpowering scent of his inner parts spilled onto the back patio, leaving a mess that would need to be cleaned with bleach, and even then might not completely be erased. Unbelievably, his corpse seemed to smile up at us as we looked upon him one final time before wrapping him in a black plastic bag. "When can we safely move him?" I whispered, my heart hammering in my throat. "Where should we dump him?" "I don't know," Joe answered in a low tone. "We can't very well put him in the Greenwaste container. I mean, what if he fell out? Besides, I don't think he'd fit." It took both of us to get his lifeless form completely encased in the plastic, and we moved quickly, breathing a prayer that we wouldn't wake our children in the scuffle. If they saw him now, we could only imagine the traumatic scars it would leave. In the end, we spent hours chopping him up into small pieces with the very knife that had caused his untimely demise. We left these pieces of him in our garden, carefully raking the dirt over his remains, lest one of our children should catch a glimpse of him, lest we should arouse their suspicions. It was almost morning by the time we finished the job and had cleaned everything up. Then, we worked on our story, what we would tell those who would surely question his sudden departure. Has anyone else had this much trouble getting rid of their jack-o-lantern? Moving a rotting pumpkin is rather like getting rid of a body, and one of the reasons that I'd rather not mess with them at all. Jonah's pumpkin weighed 115 pounds, and that is the weight of a person. The sheer size of the thing, along with my overly-active imagination, gave me the creeps. Ah well, I won't have to deal with it again until next year. To the 90% of my readers to whom it applies: Do you know what it means if you haven't sent me email or signed the guestbook? It means you are lurking. You are a lurker who is lurking. Introduce yourself. Go back to the HomePage. |
| Rest in peace, great pumpkin 10/31/07 to 11/8/07 |