We’ll stay awake for a while, my wife decides. After which she falls asleep, I watch a series and around two decide it’s time for bed. When I turn off the electric candles in the room I hear from the hallway: “What happened here?”
Flooded house, dead animal? But when I also look outside I see bags of mayonnaise and ketchup at the front door. With pieces of fries. The junk must have been thrown there sometime that evening.
“Cats,” I say, “opened a garbage bag.”
Our gray container is overfull after missing an emptying, so there are already two bags on the trailer. Easy prey for cats or other animals that smell discarded food.
My wife shakes her head: “Then that’s not here.”
“Perhaps a message,” I suggest, referring to the first part of The Godfather in which an impresario wakes up to find the severed head of his favorite horse in his bed.
“Maybe someone in the village wants to tell us something and those bags of ketchup and mayo are a warning.”
She frowns at me and I explain that I thought I had bought ketchup, but it turned out to be ‘metchup’. Mayonnaise and ketchup in one tube. “I’m sure someone saw it.” They don’t like this innovation here. Justifiably. A society is off track if there is a market for those kinds of things. But I bought it by accident.”
The eldest son provides clarity the next morning when he says that the perpetrator was a former colleague of the youngest: “He threw that in front of the door last night and refused to clean it up.”
“And why, if I may ask?”
“Wanted to have fun.”