Gina !

This is a story that begins on that autumn holiday of round the clock promiscuous consumption. And yet this tale is somewhat different from all the others in that it disregards the warm swelling of familial gratitude, as well as the platonic and erotic cesspoolian brawls that occur with spiked nog and the operation of motor trucks. This story deals in one trade, the culprit of such remark being a single bone from the breast of a clucking bird, known in the Western hemisphere as a turkey, the bone described so unscientifically as, a Wishbone.-----------------------------------The Wishbone-------------------------------------The slender man holds the wishbone with his pointer and middle finger. Dryly, it perches there, nudged between the very two digits it ought not to touch. The remark, masked in the form of a question, but stated as fact, is asked again of the saddened woman balled in a corner of the neo-modern couch, hibernating although it is mid May. “I found this. Break the wishbone.” “I don’t want to.” A beam of anger shoots through the seeing sockets of the man, his spine sending urges of electrical currents up and down, up and down the interlocking of his spine. Unable to resist the urges, the man elicits a strange terror upon the wishbone, which seems only to beg for clemency in a quick death, and does not dare seek the grace of pardon. The slender curves of the breast bone elasticize, bending spread-eagled from index to pointer, pointer to index, torn in tortuous state between two destined dooms but unable to relieve the pressure by breaking. “Break the wishbone.” This time he demands that the couple’s middle child, a curious girl with thick hair and bulging eyes—sometimes mischievous, sometimes entreatingly shy—be the bearer of desecration upon the forked pale bone. “I don’t want to either.” “I was—” The mother almost protests, but instead lets her sentence fall wind to a mute gasp. The bone seems now to bend endlessly in sync with the man, his two hands drifting further and further apart. The increasingly tremendous gap between the left and right limb of the breastbone embodies an absence of weight; the type of void found between horse and man when the human body is dragged by a sheathing leg nearly separated from socket, yet tied steadfast to the buck’s back. Finally, a humble snap is the only audible exclamation, proving to the world of six on-looking eyes that the turkey’s collar has been obscenely and permanently broken. Job well done, the man begins his trenching march from couch to kitchen carrying his cracked-apart vestiges. “I was saving that for when Brett comes home.” Again, her voice trails off from heavyset divulgeion, as her husband’s thunderous gait trails off from the den. The mother is aware of this discrepancy in her speech. She should have started out soft, and then gotten louder as he left the room. As it was the woman’s hobby to conceive of graphs in her head, she very aptly but unardorently notes that the two decaying trails—that of her own voice and her husband’s canter— might strike similar marks if charted in a mathematical replication. The middle daughter shrouds her eyes in the obliterating luminance of television and thinks she hears the pallid sound of the tiny bones being laid to rest, buried amidst a garbage pile of composting spinach, oatmeal and saltines. Both women, utterly sapped even before the skeleton procession had begun, presently sink into the couch with deadening hearts. The mother shrivels into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She can only be resolved to think that the tightening in her chest might be exactly what her oldest daughter Brett is feeling at that moment, only Brett crouched in a wet huddle, buried under tree after tree, her lungs saturated with mud, her eyes stinging with angry sun welts, her skin pulverized by dust, her palms entrenched with stones and needles, and an aching, very similar to her family’s, a wish to be nowhere but on that couch with her mother and sister, and not alone on the mountain’s sheer face of rock, exposed to the elements of God, the trees her enemy and protector as they bend to tender proportions, teasingly kiss the blanket of pinecones along the floor, only to snap back to attention and shoot buoyantly towards a rain shrouded canopy above. From her squat vantage point, Brett can make out a raven, pecking worms from his breast._____________________________________________________ ________________________________"TO a Man with A Hammer, A LOt of Things Start LoOking Like Nails."A philosophical Debate between Mizue and I:"Ku areba Laku Ari" = No pain, no gain in Japanese."Whatever doesn't kill you makes you have weak fists, puffy eyes, and scabbed knuckles." = American style."Whatever doesn't kill you makes your life suck." = Little Fitz