Possessed

According to the newspaper, officers in some small town outside of Seattle were shocked to discover a man performing sexual acts on a dying beaver. The article states that the man was in possession of methamphetamine. This feels like a typo. The story offers no sensory words. No backstory. Our most depraved moments arrive with no simple explanation. No careful contemplation of events. No arc, all spiral.

Elsewhere, a man was fined one-hundred dollars for stomping a seagull to death. It had stolen his hamburger on a crowded summer boardwalk. Bystanders vomited. Covered their children’s eyes. A little girl dropped her ice-cream cone. Pink sugar melted and oozed between the planks, clotting in the grit of the beach below.

Another man skipped work to bury the family dog. In the kitchen, the names of his children adorned a maze of boxes. Divots in the carpet marked the ghostly outlines of missing furniture. Sticky fingerprints on bare windows. A set of rings collecting dust on a marble countertop. He said he could hear the thing whining from beneath the broken earth. 

            He kept calling it good boy.