God Help Us, God Help Us
God Help Us, God Help Us
Michelle And The Abandoned Bird
November 17, 2018
Abused, Killed, Humiliated, Frozen, Forgotten, Free
Michelle has found many things on the street during her 33 electrifying years: Money, beer cans, drivers licenses, keys, bees, socks, shoes, hubcaps, hair, combs, food, baseball cards, newspapers, condoms, cassette tapes, compact discs, eyeglasses, sunglasses, Ed Asner, decomposed squirrels and lots of other stuff in postwar America.
But on this chilly fall night the street offers her something unique: a frozen turkey. Still in the bag.
Did someone forget it? Michelle always sees people walking, or sometimes skipping suspiciously, through her neighborhood armed with groceries. Did the turkey, which had to weigh at least 14 pounds, get too heavy and someone needed to make an adjustment and so they set it down for a moment and then kept walking, forgetting the frozen bird behind?
Unlikely, she thinks. How can you forget main course?
Is the turkey really a bomb? Michelle considers this as she looks over the turkey and her dog gives it many sniffs. (Michelle sniffed it only once.)
Maybe it isn’t even a turkey but a severed human head that looked like a turkey. It could be a meteor. Or perhaps a really odd, large, piece of shit.
Maybe the turkey is somehow still alive and jumped out of the car and was just saving its energy before running even further from its captors and would-be killers.
Perhaps, Michelle thinks, she’s dead and Heaven is a place where frozen turkeys are on every corner. Or maybe that’s what hell is.
Michelle is thoughtful, beautiful, kind and sensitive. So is her dog. They get no delight in finding frozen turkeys just as they are also rewarded with no joy by always phoning priests and rabbis whenever someone whistles a Christmas tune before Thanksgiving (or during breakfast) but a girl has to do her part for the social order, now doesn’t she?
Turkeys, Michelle knows terrifyingly all too well, live brief and horrible lives of confinement and other deprivations before being killed and frozen so that we can eat them while watching football and lusting after our cousins.
Michelle sighs and she and her little black dog, Rooster, walk on.
The next day she does not see the turkey. But then she does. It’s about ten feet away, leaning against a fence.
Michelle puts a sweet potato next to it and says a little prayer. --TK
Saturday, November 17, 2018