I was late. I usually am. Luckily, I saw on the group page, that other people were running late too. I was only five minutes away. Plenty of time, I thought. I waited at the traffic light. It was a beautiful, sunny day. It hadn't rained in weeks, which was rare. I glanced out of the window.
The van in front of me pulled forward, revealing something on the road. I realized that I had partly driven into it. It looked like newspapers, fallen off a van, and run over a few times. It also seemed like.... could it be? It looked like raw meat...entrails. No, it couldn't be. I pulled forward to close the gap. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a woman in the car behind me suddenly start waving her hands in a silent panic, like a mime trapped in a box with a smell. What on earth was I in?
The lights changed, I accelerated forward but my wheels span. I lurched forward. I made it through the lights. What was it? Fearfully, I drove down the hill. I managed to park near the meeting place. As I slid out of the driver's seat, I was greeted by a putrid smell. It made me feel sick. I paid for my parking ticket. I didn't know what else to do, I was late. I returned to the car and held my breath as I stuck the parking ticket to my windscreen.
I rushed inside to meet the group. "I've had the worst day ever," I announced. "I wouldn't bet on that," one of the people I was meeting said. "I have just driven through raw meat," I said. That comment silenced them.
We tried to work out if it was possible to have driven through raw meat. Eventually, one woman said, "there is an abattoir on that road." Well, that was it. The only raw meat on the road for a 150-mile radius and I drove right through it. "How offal," I said. Someone sniggered.
As I drove my car home, I wondered if this incident was a metaphor for my life. When you venture out into the world, you never know what you will find. You expect to meet friendly faces, and instead, you end up sliding around in guts. You wouldn't predict that was going to happen in a million years. Rather like life, I returned home to clean up the mess, but the smell still haunts me. How do we get rid of the things that linger? You can scrub and scrub, but the memories remain.
