Revenge of Garbage Chicken

In my old neighbourhood, there were these people. I didn't know anything about them, except that there was a man and a woman, and they spent their weekends in their garage, seemingly moving the same stuff around all the time.

The other thing I knew about them was that their garbage bags were always torn open. And that every week they contained significantly sized pieces of chicken meat. Or chicken bones. Or chicken skin.

Which Abby would always find. Because Garbage Chicken is more lucrative than regular chicken, or chicken in kibble. Sometimes you'll see it out of the corner of your eye, in its true form.


So today when we were zipping along on our morning walk I was surprised to look down and see a whole chicken breast in her mouth.

And it possessed her. It possessed her mind completely. I told her to leave it, leave the Garbage Chicken, but its grip on her was too strong. I shoved my hand into her mouth and her teeth were just locked together - she didn't try to bite down, she didn't try to open up. I bent down on the sidewalk and I yelled, like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, I yelled "free my little dog, ghost of Garbage Chicken. Let her go."

But it wouldn't. So I reached between Abby's teeth, and pulled it out shred by shred.

And we ran, ran home to safety.

But Garbage Chicken's wrath grows. It wants all the dogs it can have.

We are walking tonight, and within a minute or two of getting outside, the wind begins to blow a little more sharply. And we hear the cries of ducks, a little farther from the river than you usually can. Something is uncomfortable, not right.

I know it is Garbage Chicken, looking for us.

We speed up, go in the other direction. Garbage Chicken is losing its grip, so it opens up the skies and it begins to pour, to piss fucking cold rain out of the sky, punctuated by chunks of ice that are pounding us.

So we scurry, like the girlfriend in the Michael Jackson Thriller video, in the other direction. By now there are big puddles of icy water that have a layer of ice on the bottom and we are slipping and sliding as fast as we can.

When we see a new demon - Puddle of Meatballs.
Puddle of Meatballs manifests itself physically exactly the way you think it does. There's an oozing, flowing mass of gravy and in its salty centre are twenty, maybe twenty five full-sized meatballs.

This is too much for any dog's mind.

Abby is pulling, craning against her collar to get to it. I can feel her yearning, her longing for it. Even if they say dogs can sense evil, they can not always sense it when it comes in the form of Garbage Chicken or Puddle of Meatballs. Both of whom work for the evil powers that are too dangerous for any of us to comprehend.

I start to slip in an icy puddle of dirty water, I waver and wobble. I am resisting the demon with all my strength when I feel myself being pulled down into it. Then I remember to invoke Vegetarian Power, and I am able to right myself just in time before we sink into its depths.

Puddle of Meatballs has not succeeded in getting into Abby's mind or her mouth.

We pull away, and with a mighty roar we skid through the hail and the rain, and we get back to our house and lock all the doors and turn off all the lights and hide under a blanket.

We're safe in here now. But be careful if you have to venture out tonight, because evil lurks among us, in the seemingly safest and most normal neighbourhoods, it is all around us, hiding in banal objects and dumpsters across this land.