She Awaited the
Turkeys
by John Ohno
The load-bearing
wall groaned behind her. She would need to move
again soon.
Houses used to last a lot longer. This was the
third in as many weeks, and she had put off
leaving for longer than was wise: the previous
tenants had left furniture, and she had almost
convinced herself that the smell of rotting
carrion was actually the nearby sewage treatment
facility.
Taking a claw hammer from the pocket of her
mangled overalls, she peeled some of the boards
back from the doorjam. Covering her body with a
plastic tub, she pushed her way through three or
four feet of bloodied feathers and claws. The
smell no longer bothered her, but without the tub
she would be smothered before she could be
crushed, and the tub provided valuable protection
from the rain of small winged bodies as she made
her way to her next shelter. This area was
developed during the last real estate boom, and
so almost any house she found would probably be
abandoned. She risked a glimpse at the sky, but
it was pointless?—?as usual, the sun was
blotted out. For her efforts, she received a
white-capped chickadee in the eye.
When she was young, her parents and friends
thought it was a blessing, and treated it like a
parlor trick. They’d make jokes about Disney
princesses and sing that Carpenters song. It wasn’t
until she was ten years old that the rate had
accelerated to the point of being distressing:
her family had to replace the sliding glass doors
on the porch with something opaque, and shortly
afterward painted the outside of the house a dull
rust color to hide the blood. When the roof of
that house finally collapsed, they were still in
denial, unprepared; only she escaped.
She had been in this development for a year?—?or
maybe two. It was hard to keep track anymore. The
birds kept coming in thicker. She wore rubber
rain boots that went up above her knees, tucked
into her pants; nevertheless, some songbirds,
already mostly rotten, fell inside as she
shuffled through some of the taller mounds and
became squished between her leg and the outside
of the boot, beaks and claws and little bones
pressing into her flesh. As she pushed through a
front door, she felt an unusually large thump on
her tub: a hawk, maybe.
She pushed the door closed, reinforcing it with
boards and nails with a practiced ease. Then,
satisfied, she turned around to survey the rest
of the building. But, the back end of the house
had already collapsed: she must have already
stayed here!
She heard a banging to her left, and it jogged
her memory. This was the place with the wild
turkeys.
She had thought having turkey would be nice?—?an
easy meal. She had underestimated their strength.
That time, she had barely escaped. She had been
much stronger then?—?inside for nearly a
month.
Unable to imagine herself summoning the strength
to pull out the boards and trudge through another
deluge, she slumped, her back against the door.
She awaited the turkeys.
This
story was previously published on Medium and on John Ohno's
personal website, and it has
been adapted into an audio segment by The
Signal.
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