Dead Body

I just got home from a nice band practice with Please Step and a short errand. I got a new hose for my dishwasher. On the way here, on 20^th and Multnomah, there were twenty or so cop cars and a bus blocking the intersection. Slowly edging my way up to the incident I figured it for a car accident or maybe a bomb scare or something, but I’m still not sure exactly what happened. When I got close I could see a red flannel shirt and brown curly hair on the back of the head of a dead body lying under the bus with its hat just a few feet behind. The onlookers on the sidewalk were petrified. Maybe some of them were looking at a ghost. I just drove on by, and thought of the movie Stand by Me. Those kids actually walked for two days in search of what I had just stumbled upon. I missed all the coming of age business and all the witty Corry Feldman lines, but the end result was not too far off, a kind of surreal experience that wipes your mind clean and numbs you for a few minutes. I’m not really sure how I drove those next few blocks, for the two minutes or so after I drove by the dead body. It’s like when you have a nine to five job and you remember leaving work, but your sitting in your drive way and you don’t really know how you got there. You’re pretty sure you drove; I mean it only makes sense, you are in your car, but you don’t actually remember anything about the drive home. Now that I’m home the dishes are being washed in the other room and I’m still not sure if the dead body was a boy or a girl.