Pool by Ken Poyner

Your job is to tend the herd of giraffes that lounge in the median of Granby Street.  You bring water and food several times a day, and that is the time most likely when a traffic tie up will occur.  Motorists stop to see them knuckle down for water or stretch for the suspended food.  Sometimes a motorist will not stop, but, fascinated, will drift into the median, begin to mix with the giraffes.  Already this year one animal has been put down by car strike. Nonetheless, it counts as an accident.  You hardly ever win the monthly accident prediction pool.  By far, the red-river hogs four streets over cause the most accidents:  pushing drivers to swerve out of the hogs’ random ways, or in their bull-headed fury charging a car, which then goes careening off like a plug in a pinball machine.  With giraffes, most accidents are passive, where as the hogs add in a goodly slop of aggression.  But an accident is an accident, and they all count.  Every month I have a chance of winning.