Mishaps
It was a winter night, a bit after 10 PM. The streets were empty and cold as I strolled the dog for its last pee of the day. After picking up a scent that only canines can recognize its splendor, it pulled me towards an alley that we were familiar with. And there, in the dark, I saw the silhouette of a crouching man. I had that feeling that I was looking at something that I was not supposed to see. A few more steps forward, after examining the pavement for possible threats that the dog might ingest and other threats originated by the actual dog, I timidly looked to the man again.
Get Mauro Hilário’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
On the floor, I saw it… A fresh, medium-sized pile of human feces. I was speechless for a few seconds. I noticed that the man was nervous and trying to remain on the shadow of the wall behind him, meters away from the next street lamp. I broke the silence by saying:
- Is there no decency? For God’s sake!
He replies with deep sorrow within his voice:
- I am truly, truly sorry. I did not mean for this to happen.
Filled with disgust, I tried to conjure the words to reply, but he spoke before I could muster a full sentence in my mind:
- It is night time in the suburbs. All around it is just a concrete jungle. Really, I had no better, viable options. The others would be shitting my pants or doing this beside the main road… In all honesty, I had to go, real bad. And I’m still 10min of walking distance from my house.
Damn it. He was right. I had to give it to him. What was he going to do? Knock on the doors of the neighborhood, asking for brief access to the bathroom? Even if someone would be gullible enough to open the door, nobody would believe him.
I did not even ask him if he was going to pick up his recent masterpiece from the floor. I had the possibility of giving him a dog poop bag and I actually thought about it. But it would be too demeaning for him, already in such an unpleasent situation. So, Before walking back home with the relieved dog, I simply said with a tone of sympathy:
- I understand. If I was in your shoes… Well, good night.
Perhaps, the moral of this story is that sometimes, under certain circumstances, there is no clean or correct way of doing things. That, to the best of us, shit happens.
