How Satan's Bunny Curbs Got Their Name

When I first came to Taiwan, I hadn't skated for many years. I wanted to learn how to grind again. I found some curbs in a river park. It was a pretty grimy spot. The trash trucks park nearby, so when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, it makes the spot totally unskateable. There are lots of little stones, and it's by a sewage output station, so if the wind isn't blowing the trash truck smell of hot tropical garbage, it's blowing the smell of chlorine and presumably somewhat treated sewage water, from the other direction. It has the only pack of hostile feral dogs in all of Taipei, who harass passers by and once caught my skateboard in the mouth when they came at me. Also, it's far away, and there aren't a lot of other spots nearby, and it's really rounded curbs that are difficult to lock into. Last year, a typhoon flooded the river park and buried many of my favorite spots under three feet of stinking black mud, and I didn't go back for about a year. But the Satan's Bunny Curbs have another reason that I don't go there much.

The plot of this story will be painfully obvious after I list the details that at the time seemed circumstantial. I had smelled the smell of death during the last session there, and I don't mean metaphorically. But things die in parks, and I was vaguely hoping it was one of those dogs. The next session, the smell was still really strong. I skated for a bit and slammed. All kinds of trash is scattered around the area. I picked up  an empty shoe box to ollie over, and to my disgust, someone had thrown it out with the shoes still in it. The cardboard was all soggy from being rained on. I was totally surprised though, because sometimes I throw out my old shoes in the box that the new ones come in. Although, never in a river park. The shoes thumped and slid around inside the box, especially when I clipped the back wheels on the edge of the box. I went back to stand the box back up on end, and the sweet death smell was suddenly over-whelming. At this point, I kind of knew not to open the box, but I was wondering what sort of shoes were in there.

It wasn't shoes. It was a rabbit, with perfectly white fur. In the place where its decapitated head once was, was a writhing mass of maggots, each as thick as my pinky finger. I composed myself and left. Later, I went back to ollie a small gap that I had been coveting, but until last night, I hadn't been back for a couple of years. Not much has changed.