madam, in eden I'm adam

I didn’t take a picture of the child-sized stuffed gorilla sitting out with the rubbish when I was walking the dog this evening. The child-sized stuffed gorilla has been leaning against a fence at the end of someone’s driveway for a week, but tomorrow’s our rubbish collection so I guess it’s done for. The stuffed gorilla, being child-sized, is too big to wind up as one of those toys the collectors lash to the fronts of their trucks, and too big for a bin, and so it’s sitting there on the grass verge, leaning slightly on one of the bags, looking out into the road. I didn’t take a picture because 1) why did I want a picture, anyway?, 2) the lights were on in the front room of the house it had come from, and I didn’t want them to see, and 3) a child-sized stuffed gorilla is not a sad thing, it’s just a thing, and I hope it wasn’t thrown away because it was a sad thing. Maybe someone in the house once mentioned that they ‘liked monkeys’ and gets one every damn birthday, except god, gorillas aren’t even monkeys - google it, Nana. Maybe they got an even bigger stuffed gorilla. Maybe it’s cursed. Maybe someone in the house is sweet on a certain refuse collector who ‘likes monkeys’.