Alas poor, Rodent. I knew him not!

I will say this much about gardening. It gives you an appreciation for how hard it would be to dig a grave. I believe that, were I so inclined, my preference would be to carve the corpse into easy-to-dispose-of pieces and strew the parts in various dump sites. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, of course…

I suspect I am too faint of heart to make a convincing serial killer anyway. In fact, after making this tiny, gruesome discovery, I spent the remainder of the dig wondering when I’d recover the rest of the little fella.*

Squeamishness, aside, I will happily conjecture about fictional ways of making a body vanish. The top three picks from various cinematic heart-wrenchers (not literal) I’ve ‘enjoyed’ would have to be:

1. Take a trick from one of my favorite movies, Fried Green Tomatoes, and go the cannibalism route.  Not me eating the remains, of course, but feeding the evidence to an unsuspecting crowd of people…sure!** That, and it would make an interesting ‘Iron Chef’ episode, if it weren’t, you know, illegal.
2. Then there’s the oh-so-historically-fascinating mummification process.  A true horror buff wouldn’t wait for the body to be dead yet.  They’d use that curved hook to scoop out the living brain first and then pull the organs for canopic pickling. The most fascinating thing is, to the Egyptians, the brains weren’t considered an important enough organ to preserve. I’m not sure what was done with them–perhaps used to tan the skin of the recently deceased?  Will have to Google that one later along with whichever film I dredged this memory from. Some things your brain can never unsee.
3. And then there is the tried and true dissolve-the-body-in-lye fallback. A popular shtick of every cop/crime/mystery show I’ve ever watched. Each one had their own take on Jeffery Dahmer’s preferred mode of hocus pocus body disposus.  I can’t say I’d enjoy the smell very much, but it certainly would make the neighbors hesitate to borrow a cup of sugar if de-comp mixed with caustic chemicals was wafting from the windows.

Anyway, this is what I’m thinking while I am whacking weeds and planting flowers in the back garden. Next time you see an old lady with a twisted grin and cackling her head off as she digs into the dirt behind her house…I hope you think of me.***

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*The Mystery of the Headless Squirrel continues.

**Let’s see who’s willing to come over to my house for dinner ever again!

***Happy Mother’s Day to every body…buried, or otherwise.