picture by Jupiter
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Duck tragedy
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Ducks are definitely not the brightest birds in the world. There are a lot of them where I work on the account of the small creek running through the place. During the winter they congregate around the pastry shop because there are always weak-willed individuals who buy their bread and then can’t help feeding half of it to the ducks.
There’s also a lot more watery surface near the pastry shop in the winter than at the creek because the latter is covered with ice that doesn’t melt at the first sight of sun. At the same time the snow around the shop melts instantly leaving great big pools of water where the ducks swim and consider themselves to be in the great open waters while desperately pretending their flippers are not scratching the ground beneath. Now the creek is open again and the ducks have left. Or the smartest ducks anyway. Because when I was walking to the bus stop I saw two of them swimming in the pool together with empty bottles, old food wrappers and other disgusting debris that appears after the snow has melted. I was walking and wondering how stupid they had to be not to notice the creek on the other side of the street and then started coming up with alternative explanations for such strange behaviour. Maybe they were on a date, secretly, hiding from their respective partners. Maybe it was a Romeo & Juliet type of thing where the duck community has split into two and they were the two lovers caught in the crossfire just trying to make it work in the mad world. They were the lovers who eventually end up rejoining the two warring parties of the duck community even if they have to sacrifice their lives to make it happen. Before I got around to figuring out the reasons for such a tragic split in the duck kingdom and, you know, actually inventing the dialogue for the two star-crossed lovers, something else drew my attention. It was the man walking in front of me. He stopped and appeared to be viewing the ducks with interest. “Ah, a fellow nature lover!” I thought. Then I noticed that he had a bottle of beer in his hand (unfortunately it’s not very rare to see people walking around nursing beers at 4 o’clock Monday afternoon). A little bit weird, but OK. “You want something to watch while drinking the beer,” I thought as I passed him. It only occurred to me much later that he was probably planning to finish the bottle and toss it in the water with the rest of the junk, right in the middle of my Romeo & Juliet fantasies.
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