Ichabody

One lovely September morn, after I dropped off my husband at work, I decided my hunger was significant enough to hit a fast food drive-thru before reluctantly continuing on to my own job. I was driving across a mostly desolate (at that hour), vast parking lot of a nearby shopping center, when my morning-fogged brain registered two sensory inputs at the same time:

1) My phone was buzzing.
2) There was a corpse in the shrubbery.


The two things were a bit much for my brain to process while driving at that hour, so I pulled over and parked. I listened to my voicemail and returned a call, but that's not really important. After I hung up, I turned my attention to the naked torso in the bushes.

I’m sure you’ll be somewhat disappointed to learn that it was just a plastic mannequin. It had no arms, no legs below the thigh, and no head. But it did have boobs.

I thought, “Who would abandon such a shapely yet limbless body in the bushes, all naked and vulnerable and exposed to the elements? The poor thing!”

So I sat there in my car contemplating for a moment; then I decided to get out and investigate further.

She was in really good shape, considering. Nothing a nice warm bath wouldn't take care of. She didn't appear to be injured (apart from the lack of limbs), and...what’s this? A sturdy metal ring protruding from her neck where her head should be? Eerily perfect for – oh, I dunno – hanging from the roof of my porch at Halloween in a tattered gown with lots of fake blood?

If she’d been too nasty or broken, I wouldn’t have bothered, but I was certain I could do something with her. So when I picked up the future Bride of Ichabod, I couldn't help laughing. What were the people in passing cars thinking as I shoved her into my trunk? Was I on Candid Camera?

As I waited at the drive-thru, I had to assure myself that I was, in fact, doing nothing wrong, breaking no laws. I mean, really, wasn't I actually helping free the environment of some potentially toxic plastic waste? Still, it was a little unsettling thinking about the body hidden in the trunk of my car.

All day long I would think of her, as I sat at my mundane, soul-sucking desk job, put upon by the usual band of annoying coworkers. They didn’t know what I was capable of. They didn't suspect there might be a corpse in my trunk.