The Meat Pies

  

   Just past the primary school, below three jutting, closely clumped hills, there was a sharp bend in the road where, one day, the driver of the pie van sped round. Oblivious was he of his failure to secure the back doors of his truck and a great swathe of meat pies, in their cardboard trays, (where, in their freshly baked modesty they had been carefully placed beneath bride's veil-like sheets of semi-translucent, white paper), each of them eager in their destiny to be met by their appointed member of the salivating lunch-time public. That was, until, affected by centrifugal force, they were swept from their metal shelf lodgement, causing the payload to drop and splatter as a momentary waterfall of hot, gravy soaked meat, and soft, moist pastry, exploding, upon impact, into freshly killed, shattered meat pie carcasses.

  A sad, splattered, gastronomic torn knee-cap of shattered pastry flakes, bleeding, sweet, brown, 'meat' strewn gravy, mangulated, grit and gravel perforated.

A misshapen reminder of what their potential had once been, lying there and very slightly steaming, somewhat contrary to the pie factory owner's wishes.

Left there that day as the bounty of an error that no-one concerned was particularly eager to recall.

   On the morning of the next day, and then ever after, the residue of the pie spill was run over regularly by numbers of passing cars, of which there were many, with this road leading both to and from the primary school just passed, or before, the bend.

This continual impacting action turned the pies into thinly compressed, oblong disk tiles. Crisp, brittle and tinged at their circumferences, (when they were discernible), where the meat had congealed into a thick and long dead, gum-type substance, (inedible), with the color of a deep interior coffin brown.

This 'glue' was effectively that which affixed the pies to the surface of the road and this it maintained with an unexpectedly exceptionally strong force.

    As keenly observed by the passing (or approaching) school children, despite the continual rain, (for the season was toward the end of winter), and the occasional days of Sun, and, despite the machinations of the other elemental forces, each of which contributed to both the heating, cooling and slight washing away of the cadaverous pies, it was, indubitably, here that they remained.

   Three huge, hulking Douglas firs stretched from the embankment which composed the outer rim of the bend in the road and these towering trees, to a considerably large degree, both darkened and protected this portion of the thoroughfare from the complete true force of the natural elements, thus decreasing the rate at which the erosion of the abandoned pies took place.

    Stoically, for an inestimably long period of time they remained, like evidence of a silent-era, black and white film pie fight between the 'Keystone Kops' and a gang of criminal goons, except that in this case, other than in regard to the pies themselves, this pie fight had been utterly victimless.

    As it would be expected, inevitably from their initial unexpected moment of accidental arrival, these dubiously under nourishing nutrition laden parcels had come to the immediate attention of each and every nearby bird, ranging from the stationary Douglas fir tree mounted sparrows to the, passing by in the uppermost heavens peregrine falcon, which at the sight of the tumult, this creature had quickly flicked its superb vision equipped eyes from a height, above that of the lower flying passenger jet, to consider for a passing moment, the ground borne mass of deconstructed cattle and grain residues... only to fly on.

Obviously, this was caused by the lack of tomato sauce.

   Over time, both the local, passing and the blatantly from out of area, opportunistic, 'thought we'd just top by for a visit' type, visiting birds could be seen congregating beside the meaty pie pond. Perceptibly celebratory, pecking and scratching away at crumbs and chunks, and so tasty and and desirable were these portions to the flying creatures that during daylight hours a large group of them could often be observed at the site.

   Indeed, there was an effect upon the birds who feasted here on this corner, which was subject to a fairly constant stream of traffic. Since they were exposed to an easily sourced continual diet of junk food which, as the pies aged and became more unstable, the pieces that broke away from the mass became considerably larger.

Thus the more easily attained pieces became as effortlessly acquired to the little squawkers as the lifting of a fistful of potato chips would be to a lounge suite seated generic member of the TV viewing public, (that is, effortless), and, as these portions increased in the frequency of their consumption and became vastly more voluminous, the shiny feathered fowl, unsurprisingly, became a little heavy.

   Unlike the average western human being to whom the inevitability of a woman's bottom becoming larger as she ages is tantamount to the likelihood that her husband's bald patch will comparatively and proportionately also expand in size, the effect of weight gain upon the birds was not merely a matter of the perceived perception of one's youthful desirability having fallen away and having had one's status within society cast into the thirteenth class of what is considered to be fashionably gazed upon with a fervor of favor, in relation to the evaluation of one's 'worth' when visually perceived. For the birds the gain in girth was, when attempting to lift themselves by wing up and away from the sudden flashing metal siding of the rapidly approaching imminent source of danger, shortly, perfectly fatal.

   Initially, the victim of the inability to leap aloft long enough to allow the passing speeding car to safely depart was only one previously lottery winner level lucky to have found the pie mound, but now somewhat unfortunate sparrow. Then later joined by his other brothers until there was a veritably third dimensionally-challenged impact compacted flock, there stamped into the husks of the lost pies.

Bordering in color somewhere between pale, golden yellow and almost white, added to the pie patch were a number of yolk yellow beaked black skeletal freckles, collapsed feather frilled confused asterisk blobs, implanted as though they'd been securely nailed in place, like the hooks upon the living room wall above the fireplace upon which traditionally, three ceramic flying geese hang.

   Upon noticing the bird adornments upon the pies, the laughing children walking on the path beside the road began, as children do, in morbid fascination to stop and admire these now (fun, but) defunct birds.

One dared to precariously stand in the center of the road and, using the ruler he regularly applied to classroom labors, attempted to prize free from the thin collection, one of the birds, ignoring the shouts warning him of his own impending addition to the pile from his little brother, running frightened from the road after only managing to slightly dislodge a broken boned portion of gory wing.

   There's always one, disturbed by the concept, the child's parent, upon hearing his child's excited chirped recounting over the dinner table of the attempt to prize free and acquire a perfectly flat bird that same afternoon, and so took to the telephone during his next day's morning coffee break to question the local council whether or not it might be in their interest to remove the 'cemetarial' mass away from the surface of the road, before it was added to by either any more birds, or even more seriously, by some of the local school children?
But, it was a number of weeks before the council memorandum pile reached the level at which action could be confirmed as needing to be set in motion and only then after at least two more parental complaints (one sober) and a message from both a senior teacher and the vice principal of the school.
   By then, the pile had been added to by two cats when the 'Municipal Sanitation Dept' van finally arrived.
The sanitation engineers were shaken to notice that, amongst the between car constant up and down fluttering of tiny wings, there were visibly a few stray and lost dogs positioned, salivating on either side of the road.

In the employ of the local council, the men, who upon order removed adulterants from various surfaces, whom had traveled to the site of the ever-increasing in size pool of avian, feline and potentially possibly soon, canine corpses, were:

1. A mentally deficient with genius level broom skills and;

2. A genius with a university degree who wasn't too good with a broom, but had brilliant day dreams.

1. Felt like a pie for lunch, however, apart from actually correctly guessing at the time of their arrival that he would hear this from out of the mouth of 1. (somewhere near lunch time), it was generally outside of both the comprehension or knowledge of 2. as to the nature of the thought patterns that occupied the mind of 1.

So, other than in regard to the pressing matters at hand, he only usually engaged his workmate on the topic of three-wheeled bicycles, (also known as 'tricycles'), which was always very much to the liking of 1.

  On this day, however 1. maintained a silence throughout the entire morning while they scratched the flattened history of the saga from the road.

2. Recalled a friend named Eddie, who'd once told him that in Asia he'd heard that the Australian meat pie is commonly known by the jovial term, a 'rat's coffin'.

1. Did not like the look of this mess at all, and imagined what vast vortex of life-extinguishing horror this might have become, had they, the Sanitation crew not by lucky chance been called?

Apart from the nightmares, of it, this is all which now remains.