If it weren't for my horse
Occasionally in the course of any typical day you'll come across something which completely throws you off. Where the moment you see it, it's already gone, out of your life forevermore. But it's still managed to make its way into your head in that split second exposure. You'll have seen it, or heard it, and it made absolutely no sense to you whatsoever, but now you're intrigued. Now you want to know what was the deal with that thing. What could it mean, what was its purpose? The questions flood your mind, but there will never be any answers because you'll never see or hear it again.
Every morning, my commute to work takes me through a small town. The town itself is unremarkable — it has only a few thousand residents and takes me only about three minutes to drive through. The highway I take to work goes straight through the center of this town, and that's where this story begins. On the final curving stretch of road leaving this small town, I see a semi coming toward me in the oncoming traffic lane. That in itself isn't anything special; I pass semi trailers all the time on the highway. This particular semi, however, has been plaguing my mind all morning. Instead of being a standard box semi, this one was a long flatbed. Again, not all that strange, I see these all the time.
The cargo, however… that's what got me. On the back of this truck are three large objects. Three large… sculptures. I hesitate to call them sculptures because I'm really not sure what they were. First was a giant dog. Yep. A 10- to 12-foot tall dog. I'm hazy on the details at this point (over two hours later), but I think it was painted as a Dalmation. Ok… weird. Next up was a cow. A standard, run-of-the-mill spotted cow, except it was about 7-8 feet tall. And then another dog, this one a golden retriever about 4-5 feet tall. Each one looked like it was made of plastic of some sort, and had a glossy finish.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why there was a truck with three giant plastic animal sculptures on that highway. Part of me wanted to pull a U-turn and follow the truck to wherever these curiosities were headed. For the rest of my drive, all I could think of was, “what?” Of course I couldn't just ask the driver (being in separate vehicles on separate opposing lanes of a highway at 60 miles per hour tends to get in the way of personal communication) and couldn't ask anyone else (being alone in the car at 7am with no proof of what I had just witnessed), so it was stuck. Stuck in my head.
…what?
