The whiskers and canines should be the giveaway that Caroline harvested this cat’s head from its rotting corpse that for the past six months has been baking next to the road where we walk every day. The first few days, we were certain the poor cat was going to be picked up by some sort of animal control service, but that never happened. A concerned citizen moved its body from near the street to the other side of the sidewalk and that’s where it stayed. For some weeks, the smell of dead kitty was a wretched one and the sight of the ants followed by maggots devouring it while leaving its fur intact was an interesting process. A month after it died the fur still looked like you could pet it and then it rained.

Matted and disintegrating it just laid around all day and night. Occasionally a dog or maybe some kids with a stick would disturb its resting place but for the most part, it just became more and more desiccated in the hot desert sun. Yesterday was different though as Caroline fell behind a second while I was ahead picking up trash with my bucket and grabber so I thought nothing of things until I turned around and saw her squatting over the open grave with her hand at ground level extracting the skull of the cat from the broken and twisted pelt with bones that had been a living creature half a year ago. No, I can’t believe it either that she just reached down and collected her cat skull trophy. That though is not the worst part. As I approached her with the obvious intent of taking a photo of her grave-robbing prowess, she fished out whatever it was that was still filling its eye socket so it would look more skull-like instead of rotting animal-like. She was about to de-beard it when I stopped her, saying the whiskers made it look more natural. She brought it home with plans to finish cleaning it and then I have no idea what she’ll do with it, maybe it’ll become a candle holder?

This ginormous twisted braid of bread fresh out of the oven is a whole wheat egg loaf that almost resembles real challah except this one is industrial size. Next time she’ll halve the recipe. Well, that was my wife’s weekend, what did yours do?