Short Fiction
Poor Tom
by Ayshea Wild
So I decided, belatedly, that it was my duty to check the SignUpGenius form to see what was needed. The Thanksgiving Feast, after all, is a worthy endeavor. It brings the children together as a community and encourages them to actively consider the concepts of gratitude, by writing down things that make them happy, delayed gratification, by preparing food for one another without eating it right away, and what it means to make a meaningful contribution in the lives of others, by inviting and hosting local police officers and firefighters. This is not to abjure other platitudes such as enjoying the bounty of the harvest and taking care of each other, the school’s fifth graders going so far as to open the feast with a statement of land acknowledgement to the Native Americans who were once forcibly removed from the land beneath the diner’s feet.
To facilitate the well-turned-out children’s journey through the process of what the creation of a community celebration entails—they hand-wrote personalized invitations! They baked cookies and roasted sweet potatoes! They made table decorations! They set out 150 chairs!—their parents sign up to provide large quantities of various food items: Sticks of butter; bags of dried cranberries; jugs, or perhaps bottles, of milk; canned corn; vanilla essence.
The smart, engaged, top-of-the-class parents snapped up the easy spots right away. I scrolled down and down until I reached the blank places. The school still required four turkey cooks. Only one slot was filled, and that by a teacher. A teacher! Who was planning to go home from work and cook a turkey to bring to school the next morning. A teacher with two children of her own. And so. Awild@write-wild.com, 1 cooked turkey. Turkeys would be provided by a generous donor. The sacrifice had already been taken, bought, and delivered. Please bring the turkey back, cooked, carved and plattered, by 9 on the morning of the feast.
This meant my son would get to skip two bus rides. I picked him, and the turkey, up from school on the Wednesday. He led me to the school’s main kitchen, where I discovered four black body bags in the bottom of the deep, commercial refrigerator. The doors banged and automatically locked behind my retrieving hands, and we hauled one 18.71lb carcass home. At first, I put it on the counter to finish thawing. Then I read through the clear, inner plastic bag that the turkey should be thawed in the refrigerator only. And I stuck it on the largest shelf overnight.
On Thursday morning, my son walked to the bus stop and I removed the turkey from his three layers of plastic, cutting directly through the instructions. Which had omitted to mention that the turkey cook should store the turkey with the opening of the big black bag facing up anyway. I removed the turkey, and followed this with the removal of his neck, heart, liver, and a kidney, from his own body cavity. The school had made no mention of gravy. Surely it would be wrong to discard these, the innermost parts of his giving, the pure, smooth, plump heart, with its exposed aortae? I spared them, removed the plastic truss, allowed his legs and wings to splay, saw a vision of his halo of pristine white feathers, his red-crowned head, his place in the flock I drive past daily each November, burgeoning, brightening, then suddenly absent.
I tucked him into the oven. While he roasted, spitting and stuttering away, I dismantled the interior of my refrigerator, separating glass from plastic, mopping watered down yellow-ish red blood that had spread and trickled and pooled. Although they were bagged, I retrieved each apple—Crispin, Fuji, Macoun—from our recent u-pick, washed and dried it, and set it gleaming on the counter. As I cleansed and scrubbed and sanitized, the apples shone red and green, and the turkey goldened.
It all took around three hours. Once I had replaced the last clear, vacant crisper drawer in the brilliant light of the opened refrigerator door, it was time to remove the guest. Or the host. Ghost. And rest him and carve him up. My son, soon to be a feaster and recipient of such communal parental efforts, arrived home fresh from the bus, announced that the house smelled bad, asserted that he didn’t like chicken, and stomped off upstairs.
I carved the thick flesh, displayed it on a platter, covered it. Washed my hands. Washed pan, rack, knife, baster, thermometer, fork, grease, sink, counters, and my hands. Discarded the white bone structure. And washed my hands again.
©Ayshea Wild 2020