Feathered Friend
by Steve
A short tale for you, dear reader, to ease you into the weekend. It is all true.
So, the other day I’m out walking. Ahead of me, I see an old woman carrying a strange package, at arm’s length. It hangs down from her hand, grey, with patches of red near the bottom.
I think to myself, “My! That package is shaped a little like a pigeon! And look at that red! It is almost as if it could be blood! Hah! Imagine that! An old woman carrying a dead pigeon the full length of the street! Wouldn’t that be horrible!”
I should add here that I don’t always think with so many exclamation marks.
As I draw closer all becomes clear. Yes, it is a pigeon. Yes, that is blood. Yes, it is dead. And yes, the old woman has been carrying it the full length of the street.
I wonder if it has been run over, and if the woman is doing her civic duty in clearing the road of…er…roadkill. Or was it a beloved, departed family pet that she can’t bear to let go? Or was it a bizarre new fashion accessory? Or was I witnessing a rather bleak new take on the Dead Parrot sketch?
So many questions. So many theories.
Before I could wonder any further, the old woman dropped the dead pigeon into a large recycling bin. I didn’t realise pigeons were recyclable, but there you go. You learn something new every day.
Wait until next year 
Maybe she had really bad vision and thought it was a newspaper. Grey feathers could resemble newsprint from the right angle. As far as the blood, it reminds me of the old joke, “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”…
But back in the day when I worked in the psych hospital, one of our patients had a dog. She let the dog outside during the day, and at night, she kept the dog in the freezer. (We think it had been dead about three weeks before she got admitted to the hospital.) She was really upset that her dog would be trapped in the freezer the whole time.
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