Sorry folks, but this post is not for the squeamish (or for kids with Elf on a Shelf “narcing” on their every move to Santa). Over the years, I’ve made a few posts that might have concerned some people and assuredly typed out a few sentences that might have made a few readers raise their eyebrows. Some of that is by accident, or more likely intentional (always keep your readers guessing). Most of the time someone will call me on it and make some clever comment…. and then there are those times it just kind of slide by apparently unnoticed. Those are the situations that are most intriguing to me. Has my reader base defected? maybe it was too subtle or worse, readers are starting to associate these situations as “normal” for me (eesh). As prime example, take a previous post on the Halloween decorations (link here). In that post I was recounting how difficult it was to get ready for our annual Halloween party due to all the activities that were swirling around at the time. Let’s recall the following sentence from that post, “Oh, on Tuesday I had to dispose of a body… but more on that in an upcoming post.” I distinctly remember hashing over that sentence a couple of times and was kind of feeling bad since it was an obvious ploy to generate more comments to pad the year end summary – that is due shortly. Guess how many comments I received as a result of that specific line? 20? 10? 5? NOPE – NADA. Apparently disposing of a body is less controversial than letting my wife become a Peter Lik groupie. The good news is this post is the referred to “upcoming post” and therefore I can set the record straight.
I’m not kidding about the queasy nature of this post so if you can’t stand a little bit of gore I recommend shielding your eyes – maybe read it through your fingers to cut d0wn on the exposure – don’t forget to hold your nose at the same time. Proceed whenever you feel comfortable.
This all started when I was scouting out the woods for the Haunted Trail. Everything was in fairly good shape. There were a few trees down that had to be moved to the side, branches that had to be trimmed of their summer growth over the walkway and of course a mowing and weed whacking session to make it easier to navigate. While mowing the last section of the trail I noticed a foul stench emanating from the direction of the stream. There are some smells that immediately trigger memories (some good.. some bad … some veeerrry bad). In this case, the olfactory perception was triggering the latter. My mind immediately went to the dreaded coyote incident (link here). A week before the party and there’s a dead coyote on the property. The mind started clicking away – could I get by with just saying it was part of the Haunted Trail – added realism? Maybe it will just dry out before the party and go away on its own. As much as I wanted to believe the first option, the thought of horrifying children who might stumble on the dead carcass eliminated it. The second option was debated some, but the fact was the dead coyote from before lasted quite a while and it was staying pretty warm out. Crap, only option left was to deal with it – so off I went looking for it. The coyote assumption had improperly prepared me for what I found. 20 feet off the path I was mowing and directly on the banks of the stream was THIS:
If you have a strong stomach, feel free to hit the jump to read how this all turns out
