---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “a Bad Influence” Down in the Dirt (v129) (the May/June 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues edition) the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues / chapbooks edition) - the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 378 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Sunlight in the Sanctuary (the 2015 poetry, flash fiction, prose & artwork anthology)		get this poem collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Kid’s Table

Jack Foraker

    Thanksgiving is at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I like their house. It is in Sacramento. It smells like fireplace.
    Lots of people come to Thanksgiving. Auntie Liz tells me I am getting big. Uncle George tells me I look just like Dad. Auntie Rose tells me I am very tall. Ted asks me how old I am. I tell him five. Grandpa tells me I look just like Mom. Grandma kisses me lots.
    There is no room at the big table. I sit at a small table that is not in the dining room. It is in the hallway. Kelly and my cousin Jake sit with me. It is the kid’s table.
    Mom tells me I have to watch Kelly. She tells me I have to make sure that she does not choke because I am her older brother. We eat dinner. I make sure that Kelly does not choke.

    We go back to Sacramento for Thanksgiving again. It’s the same as last time. Mom and Dad sit at the big table. Kelly and I sit at the kid’s table. Jake makes a snowman out of his potatoes. It’s funny. Auntie Liz sees, and she tells him to stop playing with his food.
    There’s noise from the other table. We can’t see why. We go into the dining room, and there is Ted on one knee and there is Auntie Rose, crying and looking at her hand. Auntie Rose keeps saying yes and everyone is clapping and cheering.

    Auntie Liz and Uncle George have a new baby! It’s a little girl. Her name is Margaret, but we call her Marg. She’s really tiny with big brown eyes and she looks always scared. She also cries a lot. So maybe she is scared? Maybe everything being new is scary? Margaret is so tiny she can’t even sit in a high chair yet. Auntie Liz holds her and she gets to sit at the big table with them. I’m jealous, a little.

    There’s a lot of trouble getting to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Thanksgiving. First, Mom takes a long time to finish the cornbread that we’re bringing. Then, there’s a big traffic jam on the road. Mom and Dad fight over who’s fault it is that we’re late. Kelly and I stay quiet.
    When we do get there, Grandma kisses me all over like always. Auntie Rose is really fat, because she’s pregnant. The baby will come in January.

    I’ve got another sister this year, Nora. She’s a really tiny thing. I can see her from the kid’s table, looking around the living room, opening and closing her little fists. She’s always been very quiet, ever since she was born.
    Aunt Rose looks normal again, but I don’t tell her that. She hugs me and asks me how school is. I tell her. Then she says hi to Kelly. Kelly smiles and says that she looks better not pregnant. Aunt Rose laughs. Later, Mom pulls Kelly into a room and yells at her about it. I don’t see it happening, but I know that’s the reason why.

    Nora’s old enough to sit with us this year. I’m in charge of feeding her. She eats baby food, and it’s very gross. It’s like this pinkish throw-up but it smells like strawberries. I dare Kelly to try some. No way, she says. I tell Jake to try some, but he won’t do it either.

    Nora’s still in the high chair, but now she’s old enough to be mad about it. She says, No chair—over and over. I’m like, Sorry, Mom says so. She screams.
    Jake’s not sitting at our table anymore. He’s at the other table, sitting with the parents. He’s sitting in Dad’s spot. I see him sitting there, and I get angry. I tell Kelly and she nods. On the car ride back, I tell Mom that I hate her.
    And Mom says, Ryan, just don’t.

    Kelly and Nora and I spend this Thanksgiving at Dad’s new place, which is down by LA, sort of. It’s close to his parents. My grandma on Dad’s side is really good at cooking. She brings this pumpkin pie that I kind of wish we’d eat first, before the turkey and all that stuff.
    It’s just the six of us. Dad’s an only child, so we all get to sit around the same table, even little Nora. During dinner, Grandma’s all, So Ryan, how is your school going?
    And I’m like, It’s great. (Even though, a couple weeks ago, Jesse said I was a fag when I forgot to lock the bathroom stall. Even though I had such a stuffed up nose this one day that I sneezed and blew boogers all over my desk while I was sitting right next to Sarah, and she laughed at me.) I smile. After dinner, we eat the pie.

    My parents got all the holidays sorted out—we’re spending Thanksgiving and Fourth of July with Mom, and then Christmas and Easter with Dad. Easter seems like a bogus holiday if you want to know what I think.
    Anyways, I’m like about to start high school next year, but I still haven’t got a phone. Maybe I’ll get one for Christmas in a month, but I think it’s pretty dumb that I haven’t gotten one already. Jeremy just got a phone. Sean got a phone last year. Toby’s had a phone since fifth grade. Literally everyone has one. So why don’t I?
    Then there’s an announcement after dinner. I’m still sitting at the kid’s table and all, but after we’ve eaten, Aunt Rose tells us to come into the dining room, all the kids. She’s holding these pictures in her hands, and she says, crying, that she’s pregnant again. You would think my family won the lottery or something. Mom’s completely sobbing, and Grandma has her arms out, grabbing and hugging everyone, and Aunt Liz and Uncle George are both clapping and hugging other people. I clap too. I mean, obviously I’m happy for her and everything. Maybe Mom will see me and be proud of me and get me that phone.

    So Jake’s gotten all goth since last year. He has black hair. Actually, the way everyone’s reacting to it is pretty funny. Mom asks me, Do you think he’s okay? What I wouldn’t give to see Grandpa’s face when Jake sits down at his table.
    Where I’m sitting there isn’t anything exciting going on. Nora’s got this loose tooth she can twist around one-eighty, which is pretty much the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I try and text Jeremy, but Mom sees and takes my phone away. Be respectful, she spits. So nothing’s new. I had to help Uncle George take the kid’s table down from the attic; we left the high chair up there.

    But next year, we need the high chair too. It’s for Beau, Jake and Marg’s youngest brother. Grandma makes me bring it down. Jake doesn’t help. Uncle George told him to, but he’s just been on his phone since then, not helping. Like, get off your stupid phone. Help.

    Ted’s no longer with us. He and Aunt Rose split up. Mom said it was for the best, which is funny considering how she thought he was the greatest before all this drama started. Funny what a couple months can do.
    Now that Ted’s vacated our Thanksgiving, I’m the one sitting between Aunt Rose and Mom with the cornbread right in front of me. Finally, no more Nora putting cranberry sauce on her wrist and pretending she cut herself, no more Marg quietly humming the theme song to Magic Fairy Playtime as she eats her turkey, no more ribbons of mashed potato squeezing out from between the fingers of Beau’s fist, no more Kelly whining about how the stuffing is made. This table will be so much less annoying.
    But I’m wrong. This table is like way worse. All my relatives want to talk about here is politics and jobs, crap like that.

    Grandpa had a heart attack, earlier this year. He’s fine now, but there was that one day. It was like the night before a test—no. It was like the night before a final, before the biggest test of your whole life, for like math or something. Where nothing can make you think about anything else. We all thought it was going to happen. Then it didn’t.
    But now, Grandma’s serious about him quitting, and he is too—I mean, I would be too if my heart almost stopped. So when Mom and us all get to their house, it smells like nothing. Just nothing. The glass bowl of soot on the coffee table is gone and so is the one on the kitchen counter, and that mist that hung in the air’s been cleared out too. The whole house feels like new. Except for the table in the dining room, that’s still scratched and worn out. Us too, we’re all the same too.

    I have this girlfriend now, and she’s all anyone wants to ask me about. I get like the same sort of questions from everybody, said in the same pattern, like everyone’s reading off a questionnaire or something.
    Q: So, who is she?
    A: Her name’s Haley.
    Q: Tell me about her.
    A: Blonde-ish, like me. Tall for a girl. No freckles. Brown eyes—y’know?
    Q: Where is she going to college?
    A: She doesn’t know, none of us do. Decisions don’t come out till like March or April.
    Q: And how did you both meet?
    A: Um, at a football game.
    Which isn’t a lie, but does leave out some of the important details. We did meet at a football game, but neither of us made it to the actual game. We spent the whole time in the parking lot with the windows of her car rolled down a couple inches, enough that we wouldn’t suffocate. One thing led to another and here we are now: high off each other’s smells.

    Before we leave for Sac, I call Haley. Of course, she doesn’t pick up. She has this new person—a friend, she calls him. His name’s Jeff. I think they’re at the movies or something, so maybe she’s not picking up because it’s in the middle of the movie? Maybe the theater gets bad service?
    Everyone looks the same at Thanksgiving except for Jake. For one, he’s wearing a turtleneck and ripped up jeans, but he also just looks like shit, pale and droopy, basically. Without even asking, Aunt Liz says that he’s going through a rough patch, whatever that means.
    We sit down for dinner. The seats are different this year. Kelly joining us meant that everyone got shuffled around a little. Now, Grandma’s sitting where Grandpa used to sit, at the head of the table. I think about Grandpa a lot actually, his ashy hands, his clothes that still smelled like smoke, even after a year. He quit, he really did. But it was already there, the white dot on his lungs—swept through him in a breath. Sometimes, I think, you reach a point where the change itself isn’t enough.

    Grandma’s a flustered wreck, even worse than she was last year. I think the stress of the holidays has gotten to her. I tell Mom, Grandma doesn’t look so good. No, she says, she doesn’t. And Jake looks shitty too. He’s thin but somehow still looks like, at any second, he’s going to throw up. I ask him how life outside college is, and he says it’s great, which turns out to be wrong, a lie. Uncle George tells me that Jake’s been living at home for the past year.
    Dinner isn’t any better. For starters, it’s election season, and everyone thinks that this one candidate is the worst thing that could happen to this country, literally; they won’t shut up about it. And then, the turkey’s undercooked, totally raw. It’s so bad that we have to microwave it. We nuke the entire turkey in the microwave.

    After the fiasco last year, Mom agrees to host Thanksgiving at her place. She doesn’t have any sort of foldout so the kids all kneel around the coffee table in the living room, like they’re at some oriental hole-in-the-wall or something. And when I say kids, I’m using the term loosely. Nora’s in high school, and Beau’s in that strange bubble of life where it’s socially normalized, trendy even, to have metal wires glued to your teeth.
    Now that I’m of age, Mom lets me drink with the rest of my relatives, and I realize how sloppy Uncle George gets and how giggly Aunt Rose becomes when you toss a Cabernet into the mix. Jake looks like an entirely different person. I barely even recognize him. I don’t even have to ask and Aunt Liz tells all, just pours it out like an exhale. She tells me, holding a hand up to her mouth, that he has depression, officially now. She says that now he’s on some meds that help him feel better, a little more every day, and I say I’m so glad for him, and I mean it, actually. Though I now realize I’ve only seen him twenty one times in my whole life.

    Aunt Rose brings her boyfriend or S.O. or something—name’s Frank. He seems nice to me. Kelly gets demoted to the coffee table with Nora and the others to make sure there’s a chair for him right next to Aunt Rose, right next to a glistening pile of cranberry sauce.
    Over dinner, everyone talks; I don’t know what about exactly. I’ve been busy thinking of something I was talking about with Beau earlier, before we sat down to eat. Apparently, Beau’s really into archaeology right now, especially the Egyptian stuff. He was showing me this book he has, one about the Valley of Kings, a picture book, basically. Beau was telling me about this explorer—
    Aunt Rose says to me, a little drunk at this point, So Ryan, hey Ryan, how’re things? Life? The real world?
    —he travelled through the Egyptian desert, down the Nile, hunting for a pyramid, or tomb, or something. He found none of that. Then, all of a sudden, he stumbled on something undiscovered: a hidden entranceway in the valley, buried under sand and rock. Somehow, he cleared the rubble out, got it open. Then, cracking open the stone door, holding onto that golden dream of what he might find beyond (treasure, history, artifacts, the pharaoh himself), he finds nothing but cobwebs and dust.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...