It was a Saturday morning and I was out in the front yard with a leaf sweeper. There weren’t a lot of leaves but too many to rake and I was making my way up and down the yard at a steady pace.
Near one of the large trees in the yard, I stopped. There was a smell and it was horrible.
As protocol dictates, I checked my shoes. Nothing there, but there was…something.
I moved the leaf sweeper back the way I had come and started looking around on the ground – assuming it was some kind of poop, though it didn’t really smell like that.
Instead, I found something horrible.
It was roughly spherical and about the size of a golf ball. Clearly organic, it was a solid mass – mostly tan in color with some light purple and patches that looked like fat that were nearly white.
A tiny part of me was curious. What was this? How long had it been there? What animal had it come from? And what was inside?
But the rest of me – that has seen too many movies that start just like this – knew that even if this wasn’t an evil fleshy mass holding an alien parasite ready to leap out and infect me, it would still be something that I wanted no part of.
I went and got a shovel and a plastic bag. And I found a stick, which I used to carefully turn over the mass. It was about the same on the other side and I confirmed the overall shape.
Still no clues, so I scooped it up with the shovel and put it in the bag – which I set aside and partially knotted so I could reopen it if I found anything else.
I didn’t see anything so I went back to using the leaf sweeper. I kept noticing a smell, though, and stopped to investigate.
I hadn’t been quick enough to stop before and had rolled over something I think related to the mass. Something black and stringy, with smaller masses lodged inside. These strings had wrapped around the shaft of the leaf sweeper and were tangled into a foul smelling mess.
I flipped the sweeper over and got the bag open again. Armed with my trusty stick, I carefully began to unwind the strings – which I assumed at this point were squirrel intestines. Making the earlier mass perhaps a stomach?
It took a while, but I finally got all the strings unwound and bagged. I tossed the stick in the bag as well for good measure and then closed it up for good this time.
The last step was to hose off the sweeper to finally be rid of the smell. I finished the lawn sweeping without incident, but I did manage to roll over some undiscovered dog poop in the backyard that required another round with the hose.
The suburbs are no place for the weak of stomach or faint of heart.