Thanksgiving Horror
I’d always loved animal point-of-view stories, and one November I was looking at a turkey in a grocery store display and the thought hit me: what would this holiday look like from the turkey’s perspective? Not as a joke. Not as satire. As genuine horror. Once I started writing it from inside the turkey’s consciousness, using only what a turkey could see and understand and feel, the pastoral opening made the ending hit that much harder. The turkey doesn’t have words for what’s happening. She just has the smell coming through the farmhouse window and the shape on the table that used to be her sister. I’ve never been able to eat Thanksgiving turkey since I wrote this one.
Wet. Dark. Tight.
Something wants out. I want out. I am the wanting.
My beak finds the weakness in what holds me. I push. Again. Light cracks through, burns my eyes, and I push harder because the burning is better than the dark. The shell falls away in pieces and I tumble into cold air, into brightness, into a world so big it swallows me whole.
I am shaking. My feathers are slicked flat against my body, useless. But there is warmth nearby. I hear peeping, frantic and sharp, and I peep back without knowing why. Sisters. The word doesn’t exist for me, but the feeling does. We press together under the heat lamp, a pile of damp bodies slowly drying into fluff. I sleep against something breathing, and that is enough.
The world gets bigger every day.
I learn the yard by walking it, by pecking it, by tasting the dirt and the bugs and the green things that grow along the fence. My sisters scatter around me, brown and bronze moving together. We move without deciding to. When one startles, we all startle. When one finds something good to eat, we crowd in, shouldering for position. There is no loneliness. There is no being alone. We are a body with many parts.
The sun tells me when. It rises over the barn roof and I wake. It reaches the top of the sky and I find shade. It drops behind the trees and I roost, pressing against warm bodies on either side. The rhythm asks nothing of me. I give myself to it and the days slide past like water.
The farmer comes with the sun. He fills our water. He scatters grain. His hands are rough when he reaches into the flock, grabbing a bird to check her feathers or feel her weight, but he is quick about it. Not cruel. He sets us down and moves on. His eyes are sharp, always counting, always watching. I learn to stay out of his direct path. Not from fear. Just from the way water goes around a rock.
The grass is sweet after rain. I discover this on a morning when the sky has just finished weeping, and I stand in the wet yard pulling up tender shoots, water beading on my feathers. A beetle crosses my path, iridescent green, and I snap it up before thinking. The crunch between my beak. The bitter taste of its insides. Good. Everything is good here.
I find a patch of bare dirt near the coop and discover the joy of dust. I dig myself a hollow and roll, working the fine powder deep into my feathers. My sisters join me. We lie together, legs kicked up, wings spread, making small sounds of satisfaction.
The boy humans come sometimes, loud and fast on their short legs. They chase us and we run, wings half-spread, making our alarm calls. But my body knows the difference between danger and game. The boys laugh. Their sounds are sharp but not sharp in the bad way. When they catch us, their hands are clumsy and soft. They hold us wrong but they don’t hurt us. I let myself be caught sometimes. The boy strokes my feathers backward, which feels strange but not terrible, and then he lets me go and I shake myself back into order and return to my sisters.
The farmer watches the boys from the porch. He doesn’t stop them, but he doesn’t smile either. When they drop a hen too hard, when they chase one until she’s panting and panicked, he calls out in his low voice and they stop. The boys mind him. Everything on this farm minds him. He is the center. The rest of us move around him, whether we want to or not.
We forget the boys the moment they leave. The farmer is harder to forget.
The toms arrive with the spring.
They are bigger than us, strutting and ridiculous, their feathers puffed into fans, their snoods swollen and red. They make a sound deep in their chests, a thrumming that vibrates through the ground and up into my feet. They want us to be impressed.
I am not impressed.
My sisters and I pretend to ignore them. We peck at the ground, we preen, we turn our backs. The toms follow, displaying harder, drumming louder. One fans his tail so wide he tips over. My sisters and I walk away, unhurried, and I feel something that might be amusement if I had the word for it.
The biggest tom tries to corner me near the water trough. He puffs and struts and makes his ridiculous noise, blocking my path. I look at him. I look at the space between his legs. I walk straight through it, ducking under his swollen chest, and leave him standing there with his feathers out and nothing to do with them. My sisters make a sound I have never heard before, quick and sharp. If turkeys could laugh.
But the thrumming gets into me eventually. The same tom, the big one, keeps following. He is persistent in a way that stops being annoying. His feathers really do catch the light. When he displays now, I watch from the corner of my eye. On the fourth day, I stop walking away.
What happens next is brief and graceless and exactly right.
The eggs come.
I make a nest in the corner of the barn, scraping together straw and feathers and bits of my own down. The eggs arrive one at a time, warm and perfect, and I arrange them beneath me with my beak. I sit. I wait. Something is happening that I don’t understand, but my body knows what to do, so I let it.
Days pass. I leave the nest only to eat and drink, then hurry back. The eggs need my heat. I can feel them changing beneath me. My sisters visit sometimes, curious, poking their heads into my corner, but I puff up and hiss until they go away. This is mine.
The first crack appears on a morning like any other. I hear tapping from inside the shell, a tiny persistent knocking, and I hold very still. The shell breaks. A wet head emerges, blinking, peeping, and something floods through me so strong I could burst from it.
My chicks. Seven of them, eventually, staggering around the nest on impossible legs. They follow me everywhere. When I find food, I call to them, a special sound I never made before, and they come running on their ridiculous oversized feet. I tear the good things into pieces small enough for their beaks. I show them water, dipping my beak and lifting it so they can see how drinking works. They copy me, clumsy, splashing more than swallowing.
When a shadow passes overhead, I spread my wings and they rush beneath me, pressing against my warm belly. I would kill anything that tried to take them. I don’t think this. I am this.
They grow fast. Soon they are pecking on their own, wandering farther from me, testing the edges of the yard. One finds a grasshopper and chases it in circles while her siblings watch. Another discovers the dust bath and rolls until she is more dirt than bird. They are becoming themselves. I watch them become themselves.
My sisters have eggs too. The barn is full of nests, full of sitting hens, full of that patient waiting. The farmer comes through with a thing that holds. I watch him reach under my sister, his rough hand sliding beneath her breast, and pull out two eggs. She pecks at him. He ignores it. He takes eggs from the next nest, and the next, his sharp eyes counting. He passes my nest and looks at my chicks, already hatched, already stumbling around on their absurd legs. He nods once and moves on.
The hens whose eggs he took settle back down on what remains. They don’t grieve. They don’t know anything is missing. They just keep sitting, keep warming, keep waiting for cracks that may or may not come.
This is the best time. I don’t know it yet.
The farmer is different now.
He still fills the water. Still scatters grain. But something has shifted. Before, he was rough but quick, efficient, a force that moved through our lives and kept moving. Now he lingers. His sharp eyes stay on us longer. He walks among the flock slowly, reaching down to feel a breast here, a thigh there. Weighing us with his hands.
The boy humans run and laugh and grab at us with their soft hands, and my body still reads them as harmless. Nuisance, maybe. Not threat. But the farmer moves with new purpose. His hands know exactly where to grip so we cannot struggle, cannot escape, cannot do anything but hang there in his grasp. When he catches me, there is no game in it. He turns me over, examines me, prods my breast with hard fingers. I go still in his hands because something old in my blood tells me to go still. Play dead. Wait. Maybe the thing will drop you.
He smells like metal and smoke and something else, something under those smells, something my body doesn’t like. I cannot name it. But when he walks through the yard, I move away from him without deciding to. My sisters do the same. We give him space like water parts around a stone.
I watch him from across the yard. He watches back sometimes, counting us, his eyes moving from bird to bird. My chicks are grown now, their feathers full, their bodies fat from the good food he throws to us every morning. He looks at them. He looks at me. His face shows nothing I can read.
Summer ends. The air sharpens. The leaves fall and rot into the mud, and the mud freezes overnight and thaws by afternoon. We eat well, better than ever, grain and scraps and things that taste richer than anything before. My crop is always full. All of our crops are full. We are round and heavy and slow with it. I cannot run as fast as I used to. None of us can.
The farmer smiles when he feeds us now. I do not like his smile.
One morning he comes into the yard with the boy humans. They are loud like always, but they don’t chase us. They walk slowly, looking. The farmer points at different birds. The boys shake their heads. They point at others. One boy tugs at the farmer’s arm and points.
At my sister. The one who rolled in the dust with me. The one who walked away from the toms while I walked beside her.
The boy makes a sound. High and happy. He points again.
The farmer walks to her. She doesn’t run. She knows the boys. She knows their soft hands and their clumsy grabbing. She stands still because she thinks this is the game.
He grabs her by the legs and lifts her.
She screams. That sharp alarm call. Over and over.
The boys laugh. They jump up and down. One of them reaches out and touches her wing while she hangs there, beating at nothing.
I run. We all run. We scatter to the edges of the yard and press against the fence and watch. My sister hangs upside down from his hand, screaming. The boys follow the farmer to the barn, skipping, making sounds to each other.
The screaming stops.
The boys come out of the barn a little later. They are not skipping now. One of them has red on his hands. He looks at it, then wipes it on his leg. They walk back to the farmhouse. They don’t look at us.
I stand at the fence. I don’t move. I wait for her to come back. She always comes back. We scatter and then we come back together. That’s what we do.
She doesn’t come back.
The flock settles. They peck at the ground. They forget. I don’t forget. I stand at the fence and I watch the barn and I wait.
When the dark comes, I roost with my sisters, but I don’t sleep. The cold comes through my feathers. I fluff them and it doesn’t help. I watch the farmhouse. Lights in the windows. Shapes moving behind them.
The smell comes later.
It drifts across the yard, carried on the cold air. Smoke and heat and something else. Something that smells like food but not like food. My crop tightens. My body wants to move toward it. My body thinks it’s something good.
I watch the window. The shapes move around a flat thing in the middle of the place. They lean over it. They pull at something. They raise their hands to their mouths, over and over, and the smell keeps coming.
I see it.
On the flat thing. In the middle of them. Brown. Bronze. The color of us. The shape of us, but wrong. Legs pointing up. No head. They pull pieces off and put the pieces in their mouths. The small shapes. The boys. They eat and eat.
I don’t understand. But something in me knows. Something old and deep. The knowing settles into my body like cold water.
I don’t sleep that night. I watch the window until the lights go dark. I smell the smoke until it fades. I stand on the roost with my sisters and I shake, and I don’t know why I’m shaking.
The next day the flock has forgotten. They peck and dust and call to each other like nothing happened. I move with them. I peck. I dust. But I watch the farmer now. I watch the boys. They run through the yard like before. They chase us like before. But I see the red on their hands even when it isn’t there.
Some turkeys disappear. I notice. The flock shifts and I shift with it, filling the empty spaces. But I don’t forget them. I see their faces when I close my eyes. I wait for the smell.
The farmer looks at us more often now. He brings other humans sometimes, and they point at us, and he nods. They make sounds at each other. They pass things between their hands. They touch palms.
The air gets colder. The light gets thin.
They come on a gray morning.
Two men I have never seen before. They climb out of a loud thing that rattles and stinks. Their voices are too loud. They move wrong, jerky and careless, and something in me goes tight.
The farmer talks to them. Points at us. Something passes between them.
Then the men come into the yard with boxes made of thin branches. Hard edges. Openings too small to escape.
I know before I understand. My body knows. I run before my sisters do, wings pumping, feet slipping in the mud. Behind me, the chaos erupts. Turkeys scattering, screaming, the men cursing and grabbing. I make it to the fence, try to push through, but there is no through. Hands close around my legs and I am upside down, the world spinning, blood rushing to my head.
The box is small. They shove me in with three of my sisters, our bodies crammed together, no space to turn. Through the gaps I see my chicks caught one by one. I call to them. They call back, frantic, high-pitched. The sound cuts off when the boxes slam shut.
The loud thing moves. We slide against each other, shit and fear and feathers. I don’t know how long we travel.
When it stops, I smell it.
Blood. Old blood, soaked into the ground, into everything around us. Blood and meat and something sharp that burns my nostrils. My body goes rigid. Every bird in every box goes silent at once.
They stack us in a place with ground that is cold and hard. It smells of wet metal. Lights buzz overhead, too bright, turning everything the color of sickness. Water drips somewhere. The sound echoes. We are box upon box upon box, stacked three high, and through the gaps I can see the place has no sky. No way out.
I can see the next place through an opening.
There are curved things hanging from above, dozens of them, swaying slightly in the bad air. A man in a slick covering stands at a flat surface. Something sharp glints under the lights. His hands are red up to the wrists.
Nothing happens.
We wait. The boxes press against each other. I can feel my sisters breathing, their hearts beating fast against my feathers. Someone is making a low sound, over and over, a moan that doesn’t stop. I don’t know if it’s me.
The man in the slick covering walks away. He disappears through another opening. The lights keep buzzing. The water keeps dripping. We wait.
I try to move but there is nowhere to move. My wing is bent wrong against my body. It aches. I shift and the ache gets worse. I stop shifting. The moaning continues. It isn’t me. It’s the bird below me, or above me, or somewhere in the stacks. The sound finds its way into my skull and stays there.
The dripping. The buzzing. The moan.
I smell my own waste. I smell the waste of my sisters. The box grows wet beneath us and we stand in it because there is nowhere else to stand.
Time passes. I don’t know how much. The lights don’t change. Nothing changes. We wait in the buzzing and the dripping and the moan and the smell of ourselves and the smell of blood and the smell of something else, something sweet and wrong, something that is meat but not alive.
A bird in a nearby box starts throwing herself against the sides. I hear her body hitting the hard edges, over and over. She screams while she does it. The sound is not the alarm call. It’s something else. Something I’ve never heard. She keeps going until she stops. I don’t know if she’s dead or just finished.
The man comes back.
He walks to the first stack. He opens a box. Two of my sisters are pulled out by their legs, carried upside down to the other place. I hear them scream, that sharp alarm call, over and over. Then a wet thunk. Like something heavy hitting wood.
Then nothing.
Through the gaps I watch their bodies come back, moving along above us. Hanging by their feet from the curved things. Headless. Blood dripping in a thin line onto the hard ground. The bodies twitch and jerk, feet kicking at nothing. They move like they’re still trying to run. One wing spreads open, halfway, and stays there.
I watch until the bodies pass out of sight.
Another box opens. More birds. More screaming. The thunk. The silence. The bodies coming back. One of them spins slowly as it moves, round and round, and I watch it spin until it’s gone.
The moaning has stopped. I don’t know when it stopped. The only sounds now are the dripping and the buzzing and the screaming and the thunk and the silence and the screaming and the thunk and the silence.
A feather floats down from somewhere above. It drifts slowly, turning in the air, and lands on the ground near the wet red line. It is brown and bronze. It was part of someone. Now it is nothing.
More boxes open. More birds. I know their faces. I know the sounds they make. I watched them hatch. I watched them grow. One by one they go through the opening and come back wrong.
The pile in the other place grows. I can see it through the gaps. Bodies stacked on bodies. Legs tangled together. Eyes that don’t close. The pile shifts sometimes when a new body lands on top. An old body slides down and the legs move like it’s walking, but it isn’t walking, it’s just sliding, and I can’t stop watching.
Time does something wrong. It stretches until I think I’ve been here forever. Then it snaps and hours are gone and the boxes around me are emptier than they were. I don’t remember the emptying. I was somewhere else. I don’t know where.
I see one of my chicks.
She’s grown now, nearly as big as me, but I know her by the marking on her wing, the patch of lighter feathers shaped like a leaf. She is pulled from a box three rows over.
She screams for me.
I scream back. I throw myself against the hard edges until my beak bleeds, until feathers tear from my skin, until I can taste the blood in my throat. She screams and I scream and we scream together and it doesn’t matter. They carry her through the opening.
I hear her. Her voice. The voice I’ve known since she pecked her way out of the shell. I hear her scream.
The thunk.
I hear nothing.
I wait for her body to come back. I watch the opening. I don’t blink. I don’t breathe. I watch.
Her body comes back. Hanging. Swaying. Her feet curl and uncurl like she’s trying to grip a roost that isn’t there. The leaf-shaped marking is spattered red. Her body spins slowly as it moves, the way the other one did, round and round.
I watch her until she’s gone.
I make a sound. I don’t decide to make it. It comes out of me like something tearing loose. It goes on and on and on. It scrapes my throat raw. It uses up all the air in my body and I pull in more air and it keeps coming. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know if I want to stop it.
The sound stops when there’s nothing left in me to make it.
I stand in the box. The wet, the filth, the bent wing, the bleeding beak. I stand and I look at nothing. The bodies keep coming back through the opening. I don’t see them. They’re just shapes. Just colors moving past. Brown and bronze and red. Red and bronze and brown. Shapes. Colors. Nothing.
The moaning starts again. It’s me this time. I hear it from far away like it’s someone else.
The boxes empty. One row. Another. The stacks shrink around me. The man grabs and stretches and swings. The thunk comes and comes and comes. The bodies move past, more of them, all of them, everyone, everyone I’ve known, everyone I’ve touched, everyone.
The shapes. The colors. The red.
My sisters who slept against me under the heat lamp. My sisters who rolled in the dust with me. My sisters who walked away from the toms and felt something like laughter. Gone through the opening. Back on the curved things. Hanging. Swaying. Red.
The man works. The pile grows. The lights buzz. The water drips.
I am still here. I don’t know why I am still here. I don’t know what here means anymore. I am a thing in a box in a place with no sky, and there is red, and there is the thunk, and there is nothing else.
The boxes empty. Fewer and fewer. The stacks are almost gone.
My box is the last.
I know this because there is nothing else. The stacks are gone. The other birds are gone. It’s just me in the box, in the place with no sky, with the buzzing and the dripping and the red line on the ground and the pile of bodies in the other place that used to be everyone I knew.
The man walks toward me. His feet make a wet sound on the ground. I watch him come. I don’t move. I don’t scream. There is nothing left in me that knows how to do those things.
He opens the box and reaches in.
Something wakes up. Some last thing buried deeper than thought. It moves my body before I know what’s happening.
I bite him. Hard. My beak closes on the flesh of his hand and I bite until I taste blood. His blood. He swears and yanks back. I see red on his skin. Mine. A small mark, but mine.
He grabs me by both legs and hauls me out. The world spins. I flap, useless, my wings beating against nothing. The air is cold after the box. I smell the blood more strongly now. The pile is right there, close, so close I could touch it if my wings weren’t pinned.
I see the bodies. I see their eyes. They look at me and they don’t see anything because there’s nothing left in them to see.
He carries me to the other place. The flat thing. The man in the slick covering looks at me with no expression at all. His hands take me from the other man’s hands. His grip is sure. He has done this before. He has done this a thousand times. I am nothing to him. I am just the next one.
They stretch my neck across something hard and flat. It is cold. Everything is cold. I can see the sharp thing from here, crusted brown and red. I can see the hole in the ground where everything runs together.
I hear my own breathing. Fast and ragged. I hear my heart, pounding so hard it shakes my whole body. I feel my feathers pressed against the flat thing. I feel the hands holding me down.
I think of the grass after rain. The way it tasted. The way the water beaded on my feathers.
I think of my sisters in a pile under the heat lamp, when we were new, when we were wet and small and the world was just warmth and breathing and each other.
I think of my chicks. Small and perfect, pressing beneath my wings. Their peeping. Their ridiculous oversized feet. The way they looked at me like I was everything.
I think of the sun on my feathers. I think of dust. I think of fullness and warmth and the feeling of sleeping against someone who is breathing.
The hands tighten on my legs.
I feel the air move. Something rushing down. Cold at my neck, then