Marmota

As always, I took the sidewalk along the concrete mixing factory to work and on the way back I ate a chocolate chip muffin and I was thinking about my dead grandmother when I saw the brown lump of marmot torn open, its small intestine stretched to the road's centre line. I remembered how Mike used the small intestine of a preserved frog as a skipping rope in grade eleven biology, how in elementary my friends would sing "Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie! Who will be your sweetie pie!?" I would trip the rope on "B" for Brandon Foster, whose cheek I sloppily kissed before boys became scary and I wondered if anyone would be romantically inclined towards me if they knew the associative trails of my thoughts.