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It didn't look as bad as it had felt.
Okay, that's not entirely true. It looked horrible, but just for the bird, not for the truck. The truck's grill looked like it had been smashed in by a giant fist and then the fist had been left there as a decoration, still trailing gory ligaments that had once attached it to a giant arm. I knew it had once been a bird, but now it just looked like a hunk of meat occasionally decorated by feathers or spatters of blood which were already turning paste-brown in the blowing dust.
"Shit. How are we even going to get it out?" I posted my fists on my hips petulantly and scowled at the once-a-bird. On close inspection I noticed that at least one of the grill tines had snapped, and impaled the bird from one side. I hoped it had already been dead when that happened.
When I turned around to find Andrew, I saw that he had already climbed down off the shoulder and was poking around in the scrubby grassland that ran along the road. "Looking for a crowbar?" I shouted to him. He gave me the finger. I suppose it was my fault for assuming I wasn't going to have to solve our bird problem alone.
I turned back to the front of the truck just in time to catch a huge mouthful of dirt thrown by a sudden gust of wind. This gust was more violent than the ones that had thrown our food all over the rest stop thirty minutes earlier; an open slap instead of a playful shove. And colder. I looked ahead of us, to the west. The wall of clouds was roiling and angry-looking, but didn't look any closer. It was biding its time, waiting to strike. I took off my glasses and clipped them to my t-shirt collar. They were getting so dirty it was pointless to wear them if I wasn't going to be driving.
"Hey!" Andrew yelled, "Rocks!" He was still nosing around in the dust, blue bandana barely holding back his dirty blond hair, the tail of it snapping in the wind like a pennant.
As amazing as the discovery of rocks in Kansas was, I had a dead bird to deal with. The way I saw it, I had two choices. One was to try to get to the next town without getting pulled over for having an oversized poultry hood ornament, and then pay someone to extract said ornament from my truck. The other option was to cannabalize parts of my truck in an attempt to remove said bird myself. The second option was free, so it won by default.
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