I had been spending the week corrupting kids' musical toys. The enterprise is known as circuit bending. You turn cheap music toys into electronic noise instruments by experimenting, connecting components that were never meant to be linked until new and interesting sounds emerge. Typically you add control switches and knobs to allow a range of sound. Many clock radios died by my hand that week.

A faux portable radio meant for a baby's crib became the Chinese Anger Box. Unmolested, it played ten-second bursts of cheery electronic tunes... when I was done it would play a four-minute series of tones interspersed with periods of unsettling silence, or a twelve-minute arrangement of clicks and pops. The Beat Corruptor was less interesting. I only managed to add a speed control to a toy drum machine, although at its lowest speed it sounded like a leisurely axe murder.

I'd become so engrossed in this game that I didn't take time to cook, and some otherwise reasonable cuts of beef in my fridge had gone beyond the point of no return. I could have gambled that my internal microbes were stronger than whatever had built a fledgling civilization on the steak, but wasn't in a vomiting and diarrhea mood this week.

I went out to the dumpster with a bag of electronics and rotting meat big enough that I had to hold it with two hands. It was a flimsy Goodwill bag, and I told myself that if it broke open and I had to crawl around on the ground picking up garbage, I should at least have the sense to retrieve the circuit board with all the good capacitors.

When I got to the dumpster I looked inside to see how much space there was. Even though it was on top, the dead deer didn't register until I had the bag halfway inside. I saw a lot of cans, fretted that these could have been saved if we lived someplace with a recycling program, noticed a cheap schnapps bottle, then saw hooves. There was an animal in there, a dead goddamned animal in the trash, where you were supposed to put greasy plastic bags and fried chicken bones and shit. Half an animal, yet. The back end was gone. One eye stared, exposed, muddled.

I did a quick autopsy, which consisted of looking at but not touching the corpse. Extreme trauma to the neck and shoulder, abdomen slit open and internal organs removed, hind end missing. It was most likely somebody's hunting remnants, but I felt it shouldn't be in here with the trash. Shouldn't it be tossed out in the woods for the scavengers to get? It wasn't that I was offended-- I thought it was kind of neat that I should get to see an animal corpse this closely --but it was incongruent upon the generic soda cans and white kitchen garbage bags. I was so startled that when I tossed my own junk in there the bag tipped over and spilled onto the ground next to the dumpster, scattering hunks of beef fat and styrofoam flats everywhere.