yesterday, as i was walking down a quiet residential street in my neighbourhood, planning to find some lunch on the way to the library, a strange old man stopped me, rather like the ancient mariner. are you in a hurry, he called to me (from across the street,) and since i wasn't, and knowing the first rule of fairy tales to be that a person should always help strangers who hail them on the road, in case (saki's reginald says) they turned out to be the king of sweden. what then happened was that he thrust a dusty black rubbish bag at me and said "can you hold this open for me" whereupon he produced a shovel and began to scrape a particularly fresh piece of roadkill off the road. (julian: didn't you surmise his intentions when you saw the roadkill and kept walking? me: but i didn't see the roadkill until i'd crossed the street.) it was some horribly mangled monkey, or at least i thought that was what it was, i didn't like to take too close a look: my overwhelming impression was of eyes, very big eyes, and a long tail, and of glistening organs. i suppose it couldn't have been there for more than a day - it didn't have the sun-dried look of roadkill which had to wait for weekly street cleaning, and all its organs were still very red and somewhat moist, but certainly congealed. stinking, raw, spilling, and wide-eyed, yes, the eyes, i say again. i had the strong feeling that someone had made a slit down its belly and turned the animal inside out before doing the running over. its very long tail didn't even really look like a tail - more like the ringed metal hose of handheld showerheads, was it tail bone, for if so what can strip a monkey's tail down so quickly, or some kind of wire casing, but which brute had fitted it on the monkey? i stood there holding out the black bag, while the man scooped, very ineptly, with a sort of large plastic dustpan, and everytime he managed to get all or some part of the monkey onto the pan, it would, in the lifting, tumble out again onto the street, and all the time the body got more and more twisted, and the organs spilled more, oh gravity, i thought, distressed, while continuing to hold out the black bag, thinking how minyin would not have been in the least squeamish were she in my place, and resolving to be aloof and clinical as she, but all the time i was afraid that, given his unsteady handling of the dustpan, and the unwieldy and increasingly mutilated state of corpse, some part of the monkey would, instead of falling into the bag, fall onto me. finally when most of the monkey had been bagged, i fled, and was quite off my lunch, and went into the nearest cvs to buy hand sanitiser, and yet felt as if i had breached social etiquette by running away without a word.

the street i was on, by the way, was called pleasant street.