Nothing says I love you like a nice big heart, right?

Some pour souls who live on the 2300 block of NW Flanders might beg to differ. They wound up calling the cops this morning, the day after Valentine's Day, after finding exactly that on their doorstep: a big, blood-red heart.

No, not a cheap paper heart like the kind constructed by schoolchildren. Oh no! This was a real heart. A real, live, er, dead, fucking heart that once pumped with actual blood.

Cops won't say much more, except that the heart was left on top of a box on the residents’ door step and that there also was a note left on the mailbox. Police didn't even know, at first, what animal the heart came from. They took it to the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office, and pathologists there said it came from a cow. The police took the box and the note as evidence. The medical examiner’s office kept the heart. UPDATE: The police just sent out an important update. The heart was IN the box, not ON the box.

So why, then, did someone leave behind a beef heart? The unlucky recipients say they have no idea. And cops so far have no leads. Which has us ready to engage in some wild speculation.

Was the giver of the beef heart some kind of overly enthusiastic foodie? Beef hearts, after all, can be cooked and eaten in a variety of ways.

“There is no sign the beef heart was meant to be ingested,” says Sergeant Pete Simpson.

Was it a threat? Simpson says police haven’t ruled out a possible stalker but that it’s just as likely the heart was a practical joke. Simpson tells the Mercury the note was “not threatening.”

Or was it a gift from some heartbroken sadsack too shy to give a piece of their own heart? “Certainly that it happened so close to Valentine's Day," Simpson says, "is a little odd.”