![]() ![]() In Spring Hill, Florida, only 60 miles away from the Peterborough Apartments, two men were hired to clean out a vacant house. Except that two months later-it happened again. It would be irresponsible for me to use Ronald’s bizarre mishap to claim there is a larger problem in the way our culture hides the dead, refusing to see death as it truly is. By default they assume she is nothing but an old white horse. A quite literal wondrous magical creature stands before them, but it has been too long since a human has seen a unicorn. ![]() It is a dangerous trip across the countryside, but she is able to travel incognito, going unnoticed, because men do not recognize her mythical status. Unwilling to believe this is true, she leaves her forest on a quest to find others like her. Our protagonist, a unicorn, hears a passing hunter’s claim that she is the last of her kind. If you haven’t, don’t let the title fool you, the plot was deceptively dark-as all the best children’s stories are. (This seems like a non sequitur, but stay with me.) One by one the group gazed down at the woman and saw only a cheap Halloween decoration. By the time they brought the body to the dumpster, rigor mortis had taken hold (stiffening her limbs and rendering her mannequin-like). Neither did the other apartment complex employee to whom Roland showed the “mannequin.” They lacked familiarity with the singular traits of a dead body: the cold skin, the blank, absent expressions. The teenage paperboy didn’t know what he was looking at, either. And he was not alone in his misidentification of the woman’s body. Ronald threw away a dead body not out of cruelty or recklessness, but because he had no idea what he was looking at. In the midst of the reactions, one stunning truth was ignored. ![]() Later that morning Ronald received a phone call at home: “You’ve got to get back here right away.” When he arrived back at the complex, his employers told him that earlier that morning, he had thrown away a dead human body. Lifting the lid, they tossed the mannequin in, ending the ghoulish prank before any of the residents woke up. Ronald grabbed the feet, the boy grabbed a clump of the clothes, and together they carried it across the parking lot to a standard issue beige dumpster. In the dawn light it wasn’t the most convincing mannequin. “Before you leave,” Ronald asked the boy, “come help me move this.” Bending down, they saw the rubber face poking out from under a shock of white hair. Two hours later, a woman and her teenage son arrived to deliver the morning papers. Shaking his head, Ronald tossed his cigarette and headed back inside to finish out his shift. Considering this was a complex for elderly residents, a pretty sick prank. Some drunk guy must have thought it would be hilarious to pay a visit to the apartment building to toss out a mannequin, along with some splattered red paint (meant to look like blood). It was the morning of April 2, 2014, and the leftover April Fools’ Day rabble had been spat into the world only an hour earlier. Petersburg, Florida can legally remain open until 3 a.m. Ronald squinted into the dark the outline seemed almost human. ![]() Pulling smoke into his lungs, he caught sight of something sprawled on the front patio. when Ronald, the night clerk at the Peterborough Apartments, decided it was time for a cigarette break. ![]()
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