Small Town Gastronomy

by Michael Danielle Patton

Fathers eat their children. Mothers do too, but less often. They are more likely to cook you. They’ll salt, and season, and broil, and bake, but mothers hardly ever eat. They just prepare you—for your father’s stale-tobacco teeth.

I knew a family down in Wickiup, Oklahoma—back when I still called that place home. I did not know the children; their feasts happened before my time. But I’ve heard the talk: at Grandma’s Thursday Bunco and on the last Sunday of every month, over Prayer Breakfast.

It might be hard for you to imagine—parents feasting on their own flesh and blood—but their stories are as real to me as the gnashing of their father’s teeth.

***

Sophie was the oldest. It makes sense that she’d be the first. It happened young, too. She was nine, and she was tall for her age, and she always wore her hair in high ponytails. She loved The Land Before Time and the color yellow. That day, she was wearing her favorite unicorn hoodie and yellow pants. But the kids at recess didn’t notice her unicorn hoodie or the way she wore her hair or the fact that she was tall for her age; they just saw the bright red bloom on her lap. She became overwhelmed and thought of Dorothy, asleep in the field of red and yellow poppies.

“But that’s impossible—she’s just nine years old!” her teacher cried, before calling her parents. Her mother was at work still but her father was on his lunch break. On the car ride to the drug store, she felt how disgusted he was with her. She knew this was her fault.

He wouldn’t walk down the aisle with her. Sophie was alone, in front of little pink and green and yellow boxes adorned with words she had never heard before: Feminine Hygiene, Ultra-Absorbent, Menstrual Pad. She picked the one that was yellow.

Her father sent her to her room to wait for her mother, and when her mother came home, she began to prepare Sophie. They say when she cut her open that a sugar bowl— white, and painted with blue flowers—was where her heart should have been. As Sophie slow-roasted, her mother took the sugar bowl and emptied it and made a sweet barbecue glaze.

And when her father bit into her, he cried, “You’re not my little girl anymore.”

***

Billie was next, though she prefers Bill. She was fifteen when it happened. Bill wore masculinity as well as she wore her worn-out leather boots. She preferred Levi’s, and always wore two sports bras to hide the swell of her chest. She was bull-headed and stubborn. And on Sundays, Bill would argue with her mother and cry—hateful, ugly tears—when her

mother would force her to wear makeup. Bill hated that it made her look like a porcelain doll: fragile, feigned femininity.

It happened on a Sunday, during one of these fights. Bill came downstairs, dressed in her Sunday best: one of her brother’s suits and her father’s black oxfords. Her mother bawled at the sight of her and grabbed her roughly by the arm. She marched Bill back upstairs to her dressing-table and hit her hard—twice—on her bottom with her antique wooden hairbrush. And as Bill wept, she unlaced her father’s black oxfords and removed her brother’s suit and slipped into a baby-blue blouse and a flower print skirt that fell to her knees.

After church, she sat between her mother and father as they spoke to their pastor about her recent behavior. He said, “Let us prayer for Billie’s soul, and for her redemption through Christ. Let her, Dear Lord, become the kind of woman that praises you: a graceful daughter, wife, and mother.”

And they drove a spit through her—almost immediately—and roasted her over an open flame and held their Bibles like weapons and read—over and over and over—Leviticus 20:13 until three words were all that she could hear: abomination, death, blood. And they say her meat was incredibly tender, because the salt from her tears seasoned her well.

***

Hal was the third child. He was named for Haldon, a military man his father once knew and—the children assumed—respected. He was seventeen, and his thumb was calloused from flicking too many lighters for his lifetime. He smoked too much, but never in the house, and he loved to listen to Glass Animals while he got high.

He loved nonsense. He loved Dali and surrealist films, and he drew people the way he saw them: naked and contorted, half-finished—because no life was simple enough to have a beginning and an end.

And his father had been gnawing at him for years. Men don’t. Men don’t. “Then what do men do?” he asked, once.

“Just look at your brother!” his father had bellowed. “Running back, first string as freshman, and none of your pussy nonsense.”

But he liked nonsense, because it made more sense than anything else.

And when his father found his nonsense one day—his sketches of crooked bodies, and his weed, and his print of Dali’s “The Great Masturbator”—he destroyed it and beat him well and threw his tenderized body on the grill. He was cut into thick Porterhouse steaks, trimmed with fat.

***

Lincoln was the youngest, and his father’s favorite. He was thunder and lighting. He had a white flash of teeth, a white flash of hair, and they called him Zeus because he was a white flash on the field. At sixteen, he was a god; he could have anything—and anyone— he wanted. And he was a hungry god.

His siblings resented him, because they thought he was whole—that he had never been devoured by their father. But what they didn’t know was that he was a ravenous god, because he had been devoured so young.

At seven, he had found Bill’s discarded Barbies and he had asked her if he could have them. She said yes, of course, because Bill did not admire their tiny shoulders, and big hair, and painted lips like Lincoln did. He took them to his room, and laid them out across his floor, and used his mother’s hairbrush to carefully untangle their rat nest hair that Bill had left neglected for so long.

His father found him there, a naked doll in his hands, and the room shook with his anger. His father grabbed a black trash bag, stuffed the Barbies inside, and took them out to the bonfire pit. There, he gave Lincoln the lighter fuel and ordered him to douse them with the foul-smelling liquid. And Lincoln, with a trembling lip, did so. His father took out his matchbox and struck a stick and, with a quick flick of his wrist, started the massacre.

And the fire devoured them, and Lincoln watched as the orange flames ate their tiny shoulders and big hair and painted lips and he wept, silently, because men don’t.

And his father threw him on the fire as well and let them roast together, until both boy and doll were black and blistered. His father then took his charred remains and feasted well.

***

I was eighteen when it happened. Over the years, I had lost bits and pieces of myself to them: a slice of fat from my thigh, a cheek, a tongue.

I was crying in my mother’s arms, because she wanted me to break up with my girlfriend. “Because, Danielle, what would they think? I can’t sleep, for the nightmares. What if the town finds out, the church. Your father’s a deacon! I’m sure you care for her—I know you must—but you can’t, not here!”

And I screamed at her, “I never should have told you!” Hatred boiled in my mouth, and burnt my tongue. “What part of me will you take now? My ribs, my heart?!”

Her face was red and fat with tears and she sobbed, “I love you.” And I collapsed into her arms because I knew—and I know—that she does.

And my father, having heard the commotion, came into the living room to find us, crying and clinging to each other, desperately.

My mother had told him, but I did not know. He sat across from me, his hand placed lovingly on my knee, and he said, “I have feared this day for so long.” I saw the pain in his eyes. I saw the future he had planned for me—a football player, linebacker, waiting at the altar, white dress, him, walking me down the aisle—burn before his eyes; his dreams for me were on a funeral pyre.

His lips were thin, and tears blurred his face; I had never seen my father cry. “I’ll never be a grandfather…”

Then, he asked, “Have you considered celibacy?”

I went to the kitchen and grabbed a butcher’s knife. I handed it to him, wordlessly; how could I answer?

My mother kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand before entering the kitchen. I followed, and my father followed me. We made sure the oven was at an appropriate degree and I laid myself before them on the kitchen table, and he began. A chuck roast here, a pork loin there. And when he was finished carving me—dividing me—my father placed me on the heated rack and I thought of Sylvia Plath.

Once I was done and the dining table was set, my mother and father ate me. It was a quiet feast, a solemn affair, because the daughter they knew was dead.

And I knew, then, that we are all reborn, of course, once digested and shit out—but we are not the same.

Fruit of the Legume

Olivia Harris