Local Trivia: Organ harvesting

Today I worked as a job coach at a soup kitchen a few towns over. Part of my client’s job was to sort candy and chips into little brown lunchbags for distribution.

It was the most surreal part of a generally surreal experience: seeing homeless people come in and be served at their places, as at a restaurant; watching them chat and thank the servers with kindness built more on familiarity than desperate gratitude; being approached no fewer than four times by staff asking if I was eating, or a volunteer. (My coat’s style, and the fact that I never took it off, seemed to help me blend into the homeless population more than the volunteers, even though I stood behind the serving area.)

The candy was, for the most part, old Halloween candy. I’m not one to scoff at giving out old candy, as anyone who’s seen my living room candy bowl knows, but these were mostly “Halloween themed” candy, as in Tootsie pops with “scary tattoos” inside -- just think for a second about the amount of investment needed on the part of a homeless person, for applying a temporary tattoo -- and “gummy body parts.”

There were two brands of “gummy body part,” one of which included red gummy swaths near what would have been the amputation points, the other of which was neutral and matter-of-fact: This is simply a severed thumb. No need to be grotesque about it (though the effect was almost more grotesque).

I was fascinated and couldn’t stop looking at them – feet, severed tongues, ears – knowing I’d eventually come across the body-part equivalent of those blobbed, unidentifiable elephantine animals you find in every box of animal crackers.

I did. There were two flaps and clearly a bone sticking out, and severed, from between them. I scrolled through every body part I could think of, even ones that the candy company obviously would not have allowed to be distributed to children (think of the liability), but none matched up. A hip? A chest with the arm ripped off? What else had a ball-and-socket joint? (Was this gummy detailed enough for me to conclusively decide it was a ball-and-socket joint? Probably not – putting all other bone-and-muscle points of contact back into contention…)

Any conjectures would be welcomed.