I’m on my daily walk. It’s a nice day. Early summer. Birds are chirping and the air smells great. I check the curbside at the end of people’s driveways for treasure. Ours is a thrifty village and only trash goes out with the actual trash. Everything else is up for dibs. The next driveway over, I see what looks like a sizeable collection of children’s toys. As I draw closer, I see there’s an actual child—probably around one—playing amidst the toys.
The child reaches their arms out to me. It’s wearing a burlap sack, so I’m not sure if it’s male or female.
There’s a middle-aged woman doing some gardening around the house.
“Is the kid part of it?” I call up to her.
She turns, still kneeling down over the flowerbed.
“Yeah,” she says. “You can take him.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
“He’s been too hard to look after since I lost my hand.”
She fully rises to her knees and brandishes her stump. It looks reasonably fresh.
I take the kid home. I tell him we’ll take the wagon back to get some of his toys, but we never do.
We get drunk that night and the kid gets sick. He’s also really bad at talking so the night kind of turns into a bummer.
The next day he seems sluggish and not very fun at all. Plus, he apparently doesn’t know how to go to the bathroom.
I take him out to the curb along with a broken vacuum cleaner to make it look more enticing.
They’re both gone within two hours.
