I didn’t notice anything unusual when I went outside on a smoke break. Our building provides a few places to smoke—out front, in the parking garage and a sort of patio outside the glass walkway leading from the main building to the garage. I chose the patio so I could sit down at a table and relax my aching back. A co-worker came down with me, but forked off to the snack shop to get some cigarettes. I grabbed one of the black metal chairs and sat down at the matching table, lit up and exhaled slowly as the blur in my eyes from programming all day cleared away.
I took a few drags off the cigarette before my co-worker opened the door, unwrapping his pack of cigarettes and sticking one his mouth. I noticed a sound… like cardboard being dragged across the cement. That’s when I saw something unfamiliar, snagged between the bottom of the door and ground, “What the fuck is that?”
My co-worker looked down, gasped and jumped aside.
I went over to investigate, discovering to my astonishment a duck head—a real one—with a bit of spine protruding out of the neck and its beak frozen in a deeply disturbing sort of duck smile.
“Where’s the rest of it?” My co-worker asked.
Like I would know… I mean, I know I’m weird, but I don’t go around beheading ducks and I certainly don’t leave the remains laying around the smoking area at work.
I shrugged, somewhat disturbed by the striking similarity to a scene from the Godfather.
A few days later, I came back down to smoke on the patio, this time alone. The duck head had disappeared. It was like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, like some inscrutable alien left it there when nobody was looking, for some incomprehensible reason, then plucked it away one night. Like the Monolith, the duck had left me with something… not so much the flash of insight Moonwatcher received… more like a nagging melancholy.
Alone there, with my thoughts, I reminisced over the past few days… the time I first discovered the duck head. The time I wondered how sharp the row of teeth along the inside of that bill really were. The time I opened the door, the duck head dislodged and I thought it had found a permanent resting place against the windowed walkway… forever smiling and watching over the smoking patio with that deep black glassy eye.
My nostalgic interlude was interrupted when the building janitor came outside. He looked around the patio a bit, “Where are all these feathers coming from?”
I shrugged, “There was a duck head out here earlier, but those aren’t duck feathers.”
“A duck head?!”
“Yeah. A real one.”
“How did a duck head get out here?”
It was a reasonable question… the patio is elevated from the street, so a dog or some other animal couldn’t have dragged it in that way. The only way to the patio was from the glass hallway… or the sky.
I looked up into the air, quickly closing my unaccustomed eyes to the sunlight, “I don’t know man…”
I wondered where the duck head went. If the janitor hadn’t cleaned it up, who did? And, more importantly, had they treated it with the proper respect?
The janitor shook his head in a gesture of futility, “There must be another bird around here somewhere…”
“Yeah.” As the janitor went back inside, I exhaled a cloud of smoke that swirled away in the thin breeze.
“Weird. Another dead bird,” I thought, “still, I’m going to miss that duck. I’ve never known anyone who could smile like that in the face of such adversity.”