Wrote this while I didn't have internet and didn't have a chance to post it.
TRIGGER WARNING for animal death and some related psychological horror.
A week after spring finally came to northern Wisconsin, her lover—if she could call him that still, sitting at was probably an unchanging month-long dry spell, with only scattered appeasements offered to get her off his back—went turkey hunting.
Her phone, in a show of horrendous but not entirely unexpected bad luck, jumped down into the porcelain gullet of a toilet an hour before he left. She cursed it thoroughly, only thankful later that she had been entering the stall as opposed to standing up to leave it. She disassembled the old silver flip-phone and left it on a windowsill to dry. No one she asked had bags of rice—the semester was winding down, and food was being eaten so as not to leave any leftovers. When she tried plugging it in, the cord sparked in the socket and the screen bled to a blank and glowing white that reminded her, somehow, of insomnia at four in the morning. She emailed her lover, along with her mother and best friends, with exasperated sarcasm. My phone went swimming, she said. I'll have a new one in a week or so. Until then, I have scattered internet and you guys just have to await my return.
Not long after that, her lover vanished off the map.
He returned some nine hours later, exhausted and impatient, but not in bad spirits. She just happened to catch him on her way down the stairs for a cigarette, meant to calm her nerves before she tried calling him and, if necessary, finding a way back to the cabin in the woods to take care of the chocolate-colored, curly-haired spaniel they had left at home.
“We should go, the pup's been alone for fourteen hours,” he said as she gathered her things.
“I know,” she replied. “I was about to go get him.”
He nodded at her, as if he hadn't expected anything less, and she wondered what that meant.
*
There were two turkeys in the back of his burnt-orange Caliber. They weren't his, but belonged to his hunting partner and her father. “I'm going again in the morning. At three. They only wanted to hunt if someone would take the meat and I told them I would. They want the feathers, and the tails and beards. I'll pluck them and get the meat tonight—I'm a functioning insomniac. It's only ten thirty. No need to sleep. I gutted them in the yard earlier anyway. It shouldn't take too long.”
“I'll help,” she offered.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, it'll go faster that way anyway.”
She got almost entirely through the first bird before she backed off, revulsion clamoring under her tongue and somewhere at the base of her neck.
She had watched him pluck, unzip, and cut the meat away from the turkey with no problem. The gamey smell seemed frighteningly appetizing, and she felt her stomach growl more than once, even while she watched the blood ooze from the places where the bird had been shot. She marveled with him over the feathers, hoping that he would get a bird of his own the next day and give her all the feathers his partner and her father had asked to keep from these two. She even helped him pluck the feathers, though her touch was decidedly too prudish, and his own grip was much firmer, his work more efficient. It wasn't until he was vacuum-sealing the meat and she was trying to pluck the remainder of the neck feathers that her will gave out.
At first, it was the smell. She tried for the wing feathers, the big, long ones that looked like old-time quill pens begging to be shaped, but when she drew the wing back, the smell that rose from the hollowed-out bird was no longer appetizing—it was stomach-turning in its subtle rot. She folded the wing back over the bird, feeling, suddenly, the smooth motion of it in her hands, the way it must have flexed and spread and flapped when it was alive. She made a disgusted sound and moved to the small feathers on the neck instead. She got a good strip of them gone, too—five or six inches long and maybe half an inch wide. She kept getting distracted, however, by the head.
Its eyes were half-open, and she could see the wet, black beads it had seen through until sometime that morning. The skin, wrinkled, was mottled with reds and blues. She had a sudden, vivid memory of watching wild turkeys just like this one strutting behind her uncle's house on Easter, Mothers' Day, Fourth of July—every and any holiday where turkeys would be out, she guessed. She heard her mother's voice in her head, and for a moment, she was standing in her uncle's bay window, looking down at them. Look at those colors, her mother's phantom voice said. Aren't they beautiful?
She snapped herself back the the present and sighed a long breath through pursed lips. There are more of them, she told herself. And you eat turkey all the time. I bet all of them are beautiful. So what? She moved back to the neck feathers and began to pull.
The skin tore unpleasantly beneath her hands, and the feathers refused to come free. She made an urking sound and tried again, feeling moisture on the feathers. Water from his hands, she told herself. Not blood. There's barely any blood. Still, she readjusted her grip and decided to finish the strip she'd begin earlier—all the way up to the head this time. There were no more feathers behind her fingers to press down on, and when she pressed to the pale, dead, pocked flesh of the bird, it felt uncomfortably warm. She tried pulling the feathers with her eyes closed, but her fingers kept slipping. She sighed again and opened her eyes.
The head of the bird was pressed oddly to the small refrigerator at the end of the table, its neck bent. She could see the soft folds of its skin again, the black shine of its eye, and for a moment, she was sure it was alive. It must be uncomfortable, she thought nonsensically. I know I'm always uncomfortable when—
And then her mind crossed wires, and she made another nauseated sound, pushing back from the table. “I can't,” she told her lover. “I can't, I'm sorry.”
“You made it farther than I thought you would,” he told her kindly. “It's okay. Go out to the bath house, wash your hands. It's fine.”
She left quickly, shuddering in the dark. When she reached the running water, she turned the tap for the hot water and didn't touch the cold. She washed her hands three times, until they were red and stinging, and then practically raced back to the cabin. Her mind yammered the entire way there.
Uncomfortable, it must have been uncomfortable, I wonder if there's a kink in its neck, I know there always is one when my head is pressed against something like that, when someone is on me, fucking me, when they don't notice and my neck feels like snapping and they're fucking me, fucking me, I wonder if I'll feel its claws on me the next time he's fucking me—
It was all she could do to keep from crying as she locked the cabin door behind her and lit a cigarette. Her lover was finishing the bird, and she tried to pull herself back up onto the edge of logic. Besides, she had an uncanny knack for knowing when she would never sleep with a man again. It was a sense of deep resignation, a morose acceptance that settled into her chest and made a pit in her stomach. I already know he won't have sex with me again, she told herself. I even turned my claddagh ring around. He isn't going to touch me, and I'm going home in a matter of days. I heard our swan song weeks ago.
But her mind wouldn't rest. Turkey song, it sang madly, between images of its wrinkled blue and red head and the way the skin tore under her fingers. Turkey song, turkey song—
She pictured its ribcage, broken open; and felt, the way a mind has ways to feel, her lover's hands on her skin, over her breasts, along her back—
Turkey song, turkey song, you heard the turkey song—
She tried not to think of the flesh between her legs like the wet, pink meat being torn from the bird bones, slapped wetly into an enamel pan, slightly bloody—
*
She was still awake when he left for his hunt again at three that morning. She smoked another cigarette and didn't sleep until the sun came up.
She heard the whisper of feathers in her dreams.
