I was telling one of my coworkers how much I hated Baltimore summers when the explosion happened. It’s only the middle of the summer I really dislike, though. I like the beginning part, when you can feel the days grow longer and every week becomes a little bit warmer than the last, and I like the end of summer too, even though traffic gets worse in the morning and everything starts feeling more serious. I just don’t like middles, have trouble with them when I’m telling stories too. In the case of the summer, it’s just the weather. I’d always heard people comparing a hot day to an oven but I only thought it was a cliche until I started working in the city. I hate it when cliches turn true.
– The explosion, though, happened in the bed of a white pickup truck parked maybe twenty-five feet behind us. My coworker thought it was a bad idea to check it out but I couldn’t really resist. There wasn’t any fire or smoke or anything, just a boom and a poof of something powdery that looked like lime. I looked into the truck bed and there was only that lime substance — and a goose looking mildly annoyed. It seemed totally unhurt.
“What is it?” my coworker asked and I told him it was a goose.
“Is it magic?” he asked, because I guess that’s the kind of person he is.
“I don’t think so.” (Because that’s the kind of person I am.)
I gave it a couple minutes to talk, lay a golden egg, something — but no, it was seemed to be just a goose in a truck bed in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the summer, and who can say what it was doing there or what it was that caused the explosion. I thought perhaps that somebody with a little more faith would adopt the goose anyhow, feed it snacks from the vending machines (Pringles, probably, not Pop-Tarts), maybe even give it a name. And then, after you proved you could love anything mysterious, it might do something magical.
“Do you want to bring it back to the office?” I asked.
“Nah,” my coworker said and we went on.
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Tagged birds, explosions
