When I was a kid, while my parents were involved in their world, me and some other kids were goofing off outside a community center.
It was a sunny Phoenix Arizona day. There was a typical phoenix ally way along the side of the building. One afternoon we kids were just wasting time as we often did. Running around.
Flirting. Red light green light. That kinda imaginative world stuff.
Beside a dumpster there was a sheet spread over something.
We saw flies buzzing around it. We were possessed with curiosity. Some one decided we had to go check it out, may have even been me. There were only a few of us brave enough get close. We found a stick and held our noses slowly we crept up to the sheet and lifted it up.
The sight was so utterly what we hoping on some level it was not as often is the case when you are a child and your imagination has the better of you and just when you cook up a real pot of gold at the end of a rainbow you realize there ain't nothing there.
But a dead dog's rotting corpse lay there. It's eyes were missing. The sight was so jarring we screamed.
And ran away because it was so mortal ,so instinctual, to see death at a young age like that in an unexpected place, without supervision had a guttural effect.
I'll never forget the mixture of pride I had in being brave enough to check it out and the thrill and terror of having assumptions satisfied. There was a running rumor that the neighbors were Asians and ate dogs. We often would see them with all kinds of different dogs but they never lasted for long.