It’s a dream.
Especially when our Muslim neighbors fire up their bone saw on the festival of Eid. It’s a traditional Middle Eastern festival celebrated with bouncy houses for the kids and large curved knives for the slitting of goat throats.
It attracts nosy neighbors peaking over the fence (that would be me) and the nosy neighbor’s friend. (That would be my friend.)
“Did I exaggerate?”
My friend watched as a bearded man neatly cut a goat’s throat. She looked at me with big eyes and said, “Not one bit.”
“I’m so glad you’re here to be a witness. I think maybe people think that I make this stuff up. I mean I do make stuff up but this is not the stuff I make up if I did make up stuff like this. You know what stuff I mean?”
“Not one bit.”
“Exactly.”
The sound of an air compressor kicked up and a man stuck an air tube into a goat carcass inflating the goat’s skin. The goat carcass took on the shape of a helium balloon on Main Street, Disney World.
“Hey, that’s pretty slick,” she said.
Another man stripped the goat’s skin off like a used condom.
We looked at each other.
“Did I exaggerate?”
“Not one bit.”
My friend and I retired to our red neck yard circle to enjoy lemonade and eavesdropping on the neighbors. Wind rustled through the maple tree leaves. Crickets sang. We watched as the neighbors loaded a steer into a handy homemade guillotine then brought the knife down and . . . a child screamed with laughter from the bouncy house.
Overhead a circling wheel of vultures hovered over the neighbor’s gut pile. Sunlight sparkled in a bucket of blood tossed to lower the level of the blood barrel. A mockingbird practiced its bald eagle screech. Something skittered in the lantana.
My friend and I relaxed to the sound of the bone saw and the knowledge that Halloween was just right around the corner.
Linda (Make Mine Mutton) Zern
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