A nice walk home

I was walking home when I saw a broken bottle on the road. It was lying in the gutter, a beer bottle of brownish gold glass. The neck of it was broken off. I couldn’t see the missing part lying anywhere nearby. Whoever broke the bottle must have taken it with them. All that remained of its mouth was jagged sections of glass. Someone wrapped their lips around that mouth once, swallowing what was probably cold beer, maybe at the end of a hard day, maybe while walking home just like me.

I stopped for a few seconds and looked at it. I thought about picking it up and using it to slit my throat. Not really, but, what would it be like if I did? I had a cartoon-like image of what it might look like. I wondered whether someone smashed it on purpose after drinking it empty and walked away with the neck of it in their hands. Perhaps that person used it to slit someone else’s throat. You never know these days.

A short while later I saw a dead animal on the side of the road. I stopped and looked at that for a while too. I couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was, all that remained of its body was mangled black fur with splotches of red and innards that had hardened and started to turn brown.

I’ve always loved road-kill. I used to take pictures of it, back in the days when I used to carry my camera with me all the time on the off chance that I would come across something I wanted to immortalise on film.

Although, film doesn’t really exist anymore in this digital age, but you know, it’s the thought that counts. And anyway, you can’t immortalise something that is already dead.

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