Aardvark Art Glass

This morning when I reached into my coat pocket for my house keys my hand ran into a foreign object. Instead of pulling it out and looking at it I decided that I wanted to figure out what it was by feel (which is sometimes a bad idea and sometimes a very bad idea). The object felt like either a wad of hardened gum or the tooth of a large animal like a deer or a cow or maybe a shark. Both of those things have ended up in my pocket before though not real recently and not without my remembering putting them there. Not wanting to leave myself in suspense I removed the object revealing it to myself.

The object was brown and about an inch and a half long. It looked like a claw from a really big dog or a bear or maybe a badger. “What the fuck?” I said to myself. For some reason I started thinking back to last week when I went out drinking with Don and the guys from Three Floyds. There’s this large gap in my memory from that night to which I’ve been returning every time I find something peculiar or out of place in the house. (That gap is holding some answers–I just know it.) I wondered “Did we run into a bear on the way home?” I’d remember a bear, wouldn’t I?

All of a sudden my brain kicked in and I remembered where I’d seen the object before. And it was from that night we were out drinking. I remembered being at Woody and Anna’s, home of the giant pumpkin, and someone handing me a piece of this rope sausage type stuff they were selling at the bar. Like beef jerky. It was tasty. I ate as much of it as I could but toward the end of the piece my teeth weren’t sharp enough to bite through the casing so I stealthily put it in my pocket. So it was sausage and not a bear claw. That makes much more sense. Oh how that made me laugh this morning.