Like anyone else, I have people around me, acquaintances, friends and family. One of them is special. It is someone who would put themselve before me without a second thought. One who loves and cares beyond reason. One who is always there.

I’m talking, of course, about a dog.

She loves our time together so she takes me on her daily walks, as well as the night ones. Those in all fairness are in fact my responsibility. Innocent as she is, she doesn’t understand the danger of people concealed from sight, so no matter how much I respect her freedom, some things are done for the greater good.

She likes routine. Every night, she retraces her steps, revisiting the same spots to investigate who has been there and what they’ve left behind. She never tires of it. That is, until one day when she does.

No fear in her as in her life she never needed to feel any. Brave to a fault, she sometimes gets me involved in danger. Barking at a drunken creep in the middle of the night is never a good idea, yet she does it frequently.

“Stop it,” I tell her, but she doesn’t listen.

The man looks at me so I change course just enough to put some distance between us. Unlike her, I cannot afford to relax. Someone has to be aware of our surroundings.

Our little detour leads us to a new pathway—one that, despite my objections, will become part of our nightly routine for the foreseeable future. I probably never would have noticed it had I not been on high alert that night. And I never would have passed it again if not for her insistence on keeping her routine, not after seeing what I saw that night.

Any place can seem ominous at night if you look at it from the right angle—especially when you’re already on edge. But this new route… had the potential to be one of those rare cases proven to be just as it seems. Maybe it was just me, and I guess time would prove to be the decider here. Perhaps that night just gave me the angle that would shape everything to follow.

The place we circle is an old marketplace that in today’s world of supermarkets and online shopping fell to ruin and memory of different times. The streets were lined with empty storefronts, crumbling buildings, and faded memories of a busier past.

And in one of those abandoned hallways, I saw it.

A trash bag.

Lying discarded on the floor.

From the moment I noticed it—long before I understood why—it felt wrong.

Following her nature, my dog wanted to assess the situation. Instinctively, I pulled her back. Instead of passing through that corridor, we took the long way around. It was late and the atmosphere made it more unsettling than it needed to be. So I took the same approach as with the drunken man.

I thought that would be the end of it, but the next night, it was still there.

That surprised me. During the day, this street was bustling with people. Trash wasn’t uncommon in a city like ours, but in such a busy area, it never lasted long.

Still, it remained.

And still, it unsettled me.

Maybe I had just painted an eerie picture in my mind and every thought that came flooding from the preceding night was just a reflection of that. Maybe it was nothing. But by the third night, I was certain.

The shape was all wrong. I could clearly see what it was about this trash bag that gave me this off-putting feeling.

It looked like a person. Sitting. Leaning against the wall.

That realization brought no answers—only more unease. My dog tried to assess the situation again, so I pulled her back. That was my cue to leave.

In the following days, I avoided even glancing at it, though my unrelenting companion tried to steer me toward it every time. But one night, when I finally allowed myself to look, I noticed something.

The head—if that’s what it was—had slumped forward.

The fear I had felt before gradually gave way to something else. Sadness.

If there was a body inside, it was decomposing. It was no longer a threat.

Day after day, the head tilted further, little by little, but never fully. Some strength be it from the Body itself or some natural force still holding it all together. I imagined the organs inside collapsing in on themselves.

The more I looked, the more obvious it seemed to be a corpse. And yet, among the hundreds of people who walked by it daily, no one else seemed to notice.

One night, as I inhaled the fresh scent of spring flowers, a realization struck me. Warmer days were coming. With them, the heat and all the joys and problems that a temperature rise may bring. For the corps, it brings decay.

We are all subjective and often judged by such prejudice, but some qualities are so strong they make us all siblings of fate. Such is death. Decomposition has a telltale quality—one that no one can ignore. The smell.

As that realization came to me one night while standing there, looking at “the body”, I started to understand why I nor anyone else could accept it for what it was.

There was none.

Not even a trace.

That, more than anything, unsettled me.

If decay no longer smelled, then the line between what was in that bag and the rest of us walking past it had grown thinner.

Something about that terrified me in a way I couldn’t fully understand. It reignited some everpresent existential fears living inside me as a mortal being. So I started avoiding the route once again.

Sometime later as memory subsided to the back of my mind and life moved forward, I found myself walking that path again.

And I saw it.

The head—the shape that had once given it such an eerily human form—had slumped forward completely, vanishing into its lap.
Now, it looked like nothing more than an ordinary trash bag.

And just like that, I stopped paying attention. I think I remember it still so vividly only because it captivated my time for so long. Funny, how quickly the mind discards things that don’t make sense.

Recently, while walking my dog, after nearly stepping on it, suddenly and all together, the memories came flooding back.

That’s why I’m writing this now.
To remember; to not forget again.
Because something about it deserves remembrance.

It was still there.

But now, only an empty, crumpled bag, stuck to the ground by time, with faint remnants of something still lingering inside. It looked unimportant. Harmless. Pitiful. But even now, when everything felt normal again, I still couldn’t bring myself to look inside. I’m expecting that now when everything feels natural again, someone will pick it up, throw it into the garbage, and treat it like trash it seems to be.