Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“Delicious,” he says, bathing us in the glow of his ghoulish grin.

“Among the Indians it is a sacrilege to let the sacred flesh of an animal go to waste,” Dad informs us. “You must eat, boys, or the spirit of the robin will haunt you. The spirit of the robin will fly around your room at night, slither into your ears, and peck your brains until you go crazy.”

Each twin lifts a bird to his lips, sighs, and licks it clean of gravy. Each twin removes the burnt, scabby film of fried breading from his respective dead animal, wads it into a ball, places it on his tongue like a holy wafer, closes his mouth, and waits for the substance to dissolve. Tears drip from their eyes as they swallow.

“That doesn’t count as the animal itself,” says Dad, biting a robin in two. Delicate bones snap as he chews. He gulps as he swallows, and his tongue slips out to dab grease from his lips. “The flesh is the thing,” he says. “The transubstantiated spirit of the robin will fill you with the bird’s power.”

The twins pinch tufts of meat from their carcasses and line them up like pills to be swallowed whole. Little Jack eats one first.

“It tastes like pesticides,” he says.

The Runt copies Little Jack.

“It tastes like toads,” says the Runt.

According to the twins, the robins taste like hair spray, ammonia, and chicken necks. The robins taste like grasshopper meat dipped in gasoline. They taste pee-sautéed and weird. According to the twins, because the robins they slaughtered spent the morning pecking pesticidal pellets from old Mr. Horton’s mouthwash-green lawn, the birds are probably lethal.

“Get out of my sight, you ungrateful wenches,” Dad says, banging his tumbler on the table. “You better prepare yourselves for a visit from the Great Robin. It will flap into your window tonight and fill your room with feathers. The Great Robin will terrify you with its rotten worm breath. The Great Robin will drop turds the size of shoes. Calling upon the nobility of its bird genealogy, the Great Robin will sprout the atavistic claws of the pterodactyl and tear your soft, womanly bodies into bloody confetti.”

Dad grins until his mandible vanishes. The twins scramble to their feet. Dad lights a cigarette and flicks ash into the rib cage of a half-gnawed robin. A sunbeam shines directly onto the ashy carcass and lights up stained cracks in the ceramic plate.

On a rancid summer dog day, when you’re dirty and scrawny and ugly and poor, when your fingernails sting from too much biting, when the kitchen stinks of unclean plates, when there’s nowhere to go, when punishment awaits you, when swarms of gnats flicker beyond bright windows, when heat sinks your mind into the syrupy filth of boredom, when you are disgusted by the sight of your own stubbed toes, when the glimpse of an ancient neighbor drifting across the green void of his lawn fills you with a new species of sadness, a screen door slamming can shoot straight to your heart, plunging it deeper than you thought it would go.

I hold my breath for as long as I can. I exhale noisily. Dad sneers at me and pours himself another drink.

Even though my father may whip me in twenty-five minutes, I feel abandoned when he staggers off to the living room, snatching his manuscript from the top of the refrigerator. He closes the door behind him. I mope around in the kitchen, plucking crusted bowls from counters, sniffing them. I hear a creak on the stairs, and Mom steps into the greasy light of the kitchen. Her face looks puffy. Her nylon housecoat sticks to her sweaty spots. She plods to the stove, where Dad has left the platter of fried robins covered with a dented pizza pan. She lifts the pan and sniffs. Slowly, with blank black eyes, she fixes herself a plate of robin and grits and gravy and sits down under the stale bluster of the ceiling fan. She nibbles a chunk of robin from its carcass, and only after she has chewed and swallowed and made a bitter face does she see me, lurking behind her.

“What are these — quail?” she asks.

“Robins,” I say.

“Quit being a smart-ass, they must be quail, they’re just freezer-burned.”

My mother will not believe that the robins are robins, and she eats several bites of grits and robin gravy before putting down her fork. Her mind is sunk deep beneath her chewing, but eventually she registers the taste.

“They’re robins, I swear to God,” I say.

“Who would cook robins?”

“Dad, of course. He would cook anything. He would cook an iguana or a monkey or a cat.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I take Mom out back, where bright guts and rusty feathers have been strewn across the table by the scavenging spaniels. Flies crawl on the waxy shreds of organs.

My mother glances around the world she has made for herself.

“Get away from that filth,” Mom says, and she runs inside. I trudge after her.

She’s retching over the trash can but can’t bring anything up. My father appears in the kitchen doorway, crouched in drunken-ogre mode, his sarcastic smile fluttering with repressed giggles, and I slip into the shadows of the hallway. Dad lunges at my mother, staggering and twitching in his old madman routine. I’ve seen him dig his false teeth vampirically into her neck. I’ve seen her, bursting with animal happiness, gasping for kisses. But this morning Mom jumps and wrings the damp neckline of her housecoat. She rolls her eyes, mutters the word idiot , and heads for the stairs.

“Wait,” says Dad. “You’ve got to spank Kate.”

My heart sinks. My ears become the equipment of a bat, huge and intricate, keening in the shadowy emptiness.

“What did she do?”

“She stole cigarettes. And she almost made me throw up.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“As you can see, I’ve been partaking .”

“Don’t you think she’s getting too old for spankings? She’s about to grow breasts, for God’s sake.”

“What?” says Dad. “This is news to me.”

“Well, maybe not breast breasts, but something. And even if she’s not physically mature, she’s at that age.”

“She tried to make me puke my breakfast,” whines Dad.

Mom laughs.

“That’s not funny. And she attempted to make off with a whole pack of cigarettes this time.”

“Okay,” says Mom. “I’ll do it, only because you already told her, and if we don’t do what we say we’re gonna do, they’ll walk all over us. But this’ll be the last time. When school starts, we need to come up with a new kind of punishment.”

“She’s got about thirty minutes, I think,” says Dad, squinting at the place where his wristwatch usually is. “I’ll send her up.”

My parents depart to their respective lairs, and I stumble into the bright chaos of the backyard. The twins are boxing amid a throng of screaming boys. The fat, matted dogs grunt beneath our clothesline, where yellow nylon panties and linty boxer shorts flutter in a sunny dust cloud. And Cabbage squats on the picnic table, picking through robin guts with a pair of tweezers, a white dust mask covering his nose and mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” I scream at him. Cabbage jumps, which makes me smile.

“Playing operation,” he says.

“Those guts are contaminated,” I say. “You’re gonna get a disease just from touching them.”

“Disease? Like what?”

“Leprosy, AIDS, epilepsy, hemophilia, diabetes, or the Elephant Man disease.”

“Oh my God, no way!”

“Yes way. If you don’t do something fast, your muscles are gonna puff up like biscuit dough and bust right through your skin. You’re gonna bleed all over the fucking place, Cabbage. Green fungus’ll grow in your nose and mouth, and your eyes are gonna turn black and shrivel up like frostbit toes.”