The rat

There is a dead rat on the sidewalk. It has been there for over a month. At first I thought it was a dirty furry sock with a long thick tapered thread, but I later realized that the sock had eyes, a mouth, and the thread was a grooved tail. The reason I thought it was a sock at first is that it is completely flat. I don't know how it became a two-dimensional rat. It's like some cartoon cat rolled over it with a steamroller.

I've walked by this rat every day. In mild, cold, sunny, cloudy, snowy, and rainy weather, this rat has lain on the sidewalk. And every day, its perpetually opened mouth greets me. No one will clean it up. Perhaps it is because the rat lies exactly on the boundary line between a house's sidewalk and a church's sidewalk. No one seems to want to touch the dirty thing.

I'm thinking of drawing a chalk outline around the rat to bring attention to the rodent corpse (which strangely is taking a really long time to decompose...). Perhaps I will fashion a cross out of twigs and tape it in front of the rat. Or I could cut out a tombstone and write on it, "Here lies a rat. May he rest in peace on this sidewalk forever since no one wants to clean up his corpse."

Of course, the effort I put into thinking about the rat, blogging about the rat, and devising ways of bringing attention to the rat could be put into actually disposing of the rat myself. But I can't. I don't want to touch the dirty thing.