Birdseed

No one had seen Carl’s wife for over a week. Many guessed that she’d gone on a vacation or something. After two weeks, most figured that she’d been visiting a sick relative. Three weeks, and no one talked about it. A month, and no one would stop talking about it. So goes the gossip of small towns, I guess.

Two months in, everyone seemed to believe she’d left her husband of over a decade. After four months, everyone just stopped talking about it, save for when Carl’s little, blue jeep wasn’t parked in his driveway. Even then, people were quiet. No one disliked Carl, but most of us left him alone.

Carl was a good-hearted, gray haired guy who would always smile and nod if he drove by. He and his wife usually kept to themselves, which wasn’t odd for an older couple. Whenever I’d see her out and about – rare in and of itself – we would chat about idle things. Things that didn’t matter much in the end. Why she painted her nails purple this week, how my dog was liking his raw diet, shit like that.

Carl was a man who didn’t care for his front lawn. It was a lumpy hill with sparse grass. His wife, however, made a lovely, though tiny, flowerbed for her tulips. The mailbox was surrounded by a rainbow of little blossoms that burst open overnight. Pruning, watering, feeding her flowers, it was the only time I’d see her outside. The most outdoor stuff anyone saw Carl doing was when he’d step out on his front lawn, dump a huge scoop of birdseed in front of the tree in their front yard, and go back inside.

In and out in under a minute. He did this every day. Even if it rained. Even after his wife left. I lived right across from him. It was a common thing, like when I’d take his mail or newspaper to the mail slot, or drag his trash bags all the way to the curb. It was neighbourly to do, and I’d get thanked now and then. He was pretty grateful for my help after his wife was gone, especially when he’d bring those big bags of birdseed into the house. It used to take both he and his wife to do it.

That’s how the three of us started talking, really. I’d heft some big bags of birdseed for them. The three of us got along well. His wife would, those rare times when she could, would drop off a casserole or something on my stoop. I’d bring back the dishes with their mail or trash. Carl was kind of forgetful with mail and trash, but not his birdseed.

Everything went to shit when my dachshund slipped his collar on our nightly walk. Tiny legged lump that he was, he was still growing, and walks didn’t always burn off that energy of his.

“Tartuffe, here!”

Nope. He tore down the road, ears back, tongue lolling out like a hunk of boiled ham. I only caught up to him when he started rooting around in Carl’s yard. He had to have startled a half dozen crows, who cawed and flapped into the high branches furiously. They’d get their food when I got my dog.

“Tartuffe!”

Little sausage ignored me, tail going, eating away at the seeds Carl tossed out. He was crunching away at, what I assumed, was a peanut. Little shit wasn’t going to come when called, so up the hill I climbed, careful of the tulips, and hoisted him up by the scruff.

He didn’t yelp, he wasn’t a wimp. Picking him up only made him crunch harder on the peanut. Tucking him into one arm, I pried the strangely soft peanut out of his little jaws. I was ready to toss it back into the pile of seeds when I stopped. Whatever I pulled from my dogs mouth, it wasn’t a peanut. It felt kinda meaty, really. Holding it up in the fading sun, still in Carl’s front yard, crows overhead, I realized what my dog had had.
My eyes widened at the sight of familiar, purple nail polish, on that withered, chewed finger.

I bolted across the street, wiener dog in one hand, toe in the other. The police were on my doorstep in under ten minutes. Carl’s little, blue jeep rolled up the street a few minutes after. He was in cuffs after a twenty second chat. He’d had a jumbo bag of birdseed in his back seat.

I was called in for questioning, of course, but I couldn’t tell the police anything more than what they knew from my 911 call. No one saw his wife for months, and everyone assumed that she’d left him, but never, in a hundred years, did anyone think this would happen.

I watched from my basement window, Tartuffe in my lap, as the police tape went up. I kept out of sight. There were so many plastic bags of evidence pulled from that house. I think I saw a cleaver. I know I saw a huge ass meat grinder. A gurney, with a misshapen body-bag on top, was carted out the front door. The police dug up the flower bed, the whole yard, the back yard, all of it. The neighbourhood was abuzz for weeks after, all about the man they thought they knew. About what he was hiding in his basement, and his birdseed.

According to the police report that had been released some time later, Carl had been abducting young women around the area for god knows how long. Mostly teenaged girls, because he could stuff them into the burlap birdseed bags, and heft them back into his house. He’d been using the birdseed and meat grinder to get rid of the parts he didn’t want to keep. Bones, guts, and the like. He kept the calves and feet, from the knees down. There were two freezers full of feet, and bone meal, and crushed teeth.

Christ, I couldn’t believe it. None of it made any sense to me. Carl wasn’t a madman, but once I found the finger, I knew I had to do something. I mean, when I first helped him get the bags into the house, I waited until we were outside to confront him about the high heel that I felt poking my palm. How I could see the blue color of it through the cloth, and that he should start using a new bag soon because that was gonna rip. I offered to help.

Of course he was reluctant, thank god for his wife being in the doorway. She wanted to know what I wanted to do. I told them I wanted to switch my pup to a raw diet, how they could help me out with that. Hell, Carl’s wife was the one that told me to never kill someone you know. That’s how I got to getting his mail and trash for him, he had to dispose of what he didn’t keep in some way, other than the birdseed bags. Nobody cared if I brought a bag of ‘trash’ to my house every couple of days, or that I’d finish off a ‘casserole’ in a day or less. The people on this street notice a missing woman, but not that.

What upsets me more than anything was that his wife was a total sweetheart! Keeping quiet, staying at home to clean up after Carl was done in the basement, tending her flowers, dropping off thank-yous. They had been partners long before they married. She was always so nice to me and my dog. Maybe she was tired of the messes, or getting her nails ruined scrubbing out that big ass meat grinder. Maybe she threatened to turn her husband in to the police, and Carl turned her into hamburger. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, really.

There’s at least three pounds of thank-yous in my fridge. I just hope my little sausage dog can get used to canned crap after all of that’s gone.

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Credits to: ShadowCrest