Keep him off the cart because he's not yet dead
This
morning, while my wife went to the farmers market, I took a walk to the
place I like to call Ethnictown, to replenish our stock of Indian food.
This former city center of Mississauga is pretty much the only area
around here where you can go at any time and encounter lots of other
pedestrians, almost as if you were in a real city. The said
neighbourhood contains, for example, an international food court inside
an old little mall in which all stores are currently run by various
immigrants. But I wasn't going to dine there today, since my target was
a well-stocked Indian grocery store. To ensure maximum authenticity, I
listened to some Dr. Bombay in my MP3 headset as I picked up various Indian delicacies.
By the way, that particular food court is my favourite since you can eat there well for $5. Can't beat neither the price or the quality. Occasionally you even see another white face there, but the other customers generally seem to practice kind of a voluntary self-segregation over there so that the customers of each ethnic group eat among their own, so that Korean customers eat Korean, Indian customers eat Indian, black customers eat jerk chicken and so on. I have been looking around me to catch an exception to this rule, but it just never seems to happen. As a white man, I naturally have the privilege to eat anything I want, but for some reason I haven't joined my black brothers to queue up for jerk chicken. After all, this food pretty much has to be good, judging from the long lines.
Along the way, I came upon a dead wild animal that was lying on the middle of the sidewalk. It was some kind of rodent, about the size of a cat. It was not a raccoon. The animal looked like it was just sleeping (until now I thought that this cliche was only a figurative expression, but I had to hold back a slight urge to actually pet it), as it was lying on its stomach eyes closed, its little back legs stretched behind it, the same way that bulldogs lie. How very strange. Come to think of it, during the past week I have encountered five dead animals this way, although the first four were various birds. Perhaps the next one is a human, then.
All five were freshly dead so that there was not even a single fly buzzing around them, the decomposition not having even begun yet. Before this, the only few dead animals I have seen around here were little dead birds in advances stages of decomposition. Were I a superstitious man, I might take this as some kind of bad omen. Even so, I stopped and looked at the sky, sternly thinking to myself "Something bad is in the air", trying to look dramatic and capture this moment in the last panel of an issue of a comic book of my life that perhaps the people in some other dimension buy and read the same way that we buy and read Archie around here.
By the way, that particular food court is my favourite since you can eat there well for $5. Can't beat neither the price or the quality. Occasionally you even see another white face there, but the other customers generally seem to practice kind of a voluntary self-segregation over there so that the customers of each ethnic group eat among their own, so that Korean customers eat Korean, Indian customers eat Indian, black customers eat jerk chicken and so on. I have been looking around me to catch an exception to this rule, but it just never seems to happen. As a white man, I naturally have the privilege to eat anything I want, but for some reason I haven't joined my black brothers to queue up for jerk chicken. After all, this food pretty much has to be good, judging from the long lines.
Along the way, I came upon a dead wild animal that was lying on the middle of the sidewalk. It was some kind of rodent, about the size of a cat. It was not a raccoon. The animal looked like it was just sleeping (until now I thought that this cliche was only a figurative expression, but I had to hold back a slight urge to actually pet it), as it was lying on its stomach eyes closed, its little back legs stretched behind it, the same way that bulldogs lie. How very strange. Come to think of it, during the past week I have encountered five dead animals this way, although the first four were various birds. Perhaps the next one is a human, then.
All five were freshly dead so that there was not even a single fly buzzing around them, the decomposition not having even begun yet. Before this, the only few dead animals I have seen around here were little dead birds in advances stages of decomposition. Were I a superstitious man, I might take this as some kind of bad omen. Even so, I stopped and looked at the sky, sternly thinking to myself "Something bad is in the air", trying to look dramatic and capture this moment in the last panel of an issue of a comic book of my life that perhaps the people in some other dimension buy and read the same way that we buy and read Archie around here.
If what you saw looked a bit like a rat, It’s North America’s only marsupial, the opossum, and may not even have been dead, just playing ‘possum. Anyway, try the jerk chicken, and the goat roti, quite good.
wk
Posted by Anonymous | 7:58 PM
It might have been an ROUS.
Posted by Rochelle | 6:39 AM