“Have the turkeys stopped gobbling, Clarice?” was the alternative title for this article, but this is a true family story after all so I want to be accurate. Horribly, horribly accurate.
Fair warning here, folks. The following story involves a mild amount of gore. Televised gore,
though, so… not so bad?
I’m over at my Mom’s, sitting on the sofa in her living room. I like the space and how she’s
decorated the walls with artsy masks, pictures of cats, and other interesting nick-knacks. Lots
of candles make the atmosphere comfy. A small electric faux fireplace with fake logs in the
corner makes for a cheeky decoration. A great living room, over all.
Mom’s in the kitchen getting dinner together. I’d offered to help as I usually do, which got the
usual response of “No! Get out of here! Stay out of my way!” from my beloved Mother. I high-tail
it out of the kitchen because if I’m not fast enough she’ll start waving the paring knife she’s
holding in my general direction.
Exiled to watching TV on the sofa, I begin flipping channels with the remote. You’d think with
the 1,217 channels available there’d be something good to watch. I stop on a program that looks
like a nature documentary about wild turkeys.
They are beautiful birds and the damn fine camera work of the TV program shows off the
multi-colored feathers of a fine gobbling specimen wandering around in a green sunlit field. A
gorgeous televised tableau made alive by its living grandeur, a living splash of life wandering
and gobbling in a forest painting made of infinite pastels of green grass and dappled dark brown
trees.
Ah, one of God’s beautiful creatures. Beautifully delicious.
Then the scene jump-cuts to a large well-fed man with a hearty red-brown beard. He’s dressed in
hunter’s garb, orange vest, camouflage jumpsuit and baseball hat, the whole cliché. He looks
American. Point of fact, he looks extremely American because he’s holding a big-ass hunting
rifle.
“I’m about to bag me a good-sized gobbler over there, a-yup,” says Big Hunter Guy.
“I’ll be real quiet-like sneaking up on the target, ’cause I don’t want to scare him off.
Keep your eye on the bird, folks!”
He crouches down like a sumo wrestler who’s decided to become a ninja and begins creeping
off-camera while bringing the rifle up to his shoulder.
Sometimes I lose control of my brain and it makes me do things that I know will get me in
trouble, but I can’t stop myself because I know what I’m about to do will be funny. Well, at
least to me. And this moment, Dear Reader, is one of those moments.
As the scene goes back to the stunningly majestic wild turkey, I hear the words, “Hey Mom, you
gotta see this!” launch out of my mouth like errant cruise missiles fuelled by a severe lack of
judgment.
The kitchen is just down the hall so Mom’s walking in the living room with just a few steps.
“What… oh, Dan, that’s amazing! What a beautiful animal!” she says to me with an appreciative
smile on her face.
My Mother loves animals. “Gorgeous feathers, eh?” I say with strained innocence.
“Oh, yes. That’s a wild turkey, isn’t it? Amazing.”
The camera zooms in on the turkey’s head. Being in high-definition on the television, every
detail seems to leap out off the screen.
Mother is shaking her head in wonder. It’s incredible to think there’s so many stunning animals
on this planet, all the -”
BLAM!
I tried putting in “turkey with exploding head” in generative AI text-to-image but every result was horribly grim, so let’s just go with this image.
The turkey’s head explode-dissolves into an avian meat mist. Like a be-feathered JFK in nature’s
Dealy Plaza, the bird’s cranium parts ways in a violent burst of red and pink and purple that is
also impressively crystal clear in high-definition video.
“OH, GOD!” Mother half-screams.
Whoops, I may have strayed past the edge with this one, I think to myself.
Mr. American Big Guy walks onto the scene as Mother is trying to collect herself and gather
enough air into her lungs to berate me.
“Yee-haw, got ‘em! That’s where ya shoot these gobblers, folks! Right in the HEAD!”
bellows the turkey assassin.
“DAN! How could you show something like that to me?!?” The expression on Mom’s face is moving
from her usual pleasant smile to a more I’m About To Stomp Your Ass demeanor.
(You know when you do something stupid but kind of funny that you try to play off with a smile,
but you’re wincing so much at your own stupidity and the lack of positive response from your
audience that you look like a constipated grinning idiot? Such a smiling wince should have its
own word, like maybe “Smincing”.)
“Ah, sorry, Mom?” I sminced at her. “I thought it’d be… funny?”
Mother put her hands on her hips. “Well, that’s NOT funny! You know I love animals!”
“Shore is some good eatin’ right here, brothers,” opined Mr. Big American Hunter with a
satisfied yet greasy-sounding voice.
“I know you do, Mom, but I thought -”
“Your own Mother! Didn’t I raise you right?!?” she yells at me with the rattled and annoyed
voice I’ve heard so many times before in my life.
“Yes, but I -”
“I’m trying to make you dinner and I get the shock of my life seeing some poor turkey getting
its head blown off because you thought it would make me laugh?”
“… kinda?” I meeped, hanging my head in shame.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, boy. Change the channel!”
“Okay! Okay!” I mash the appropriate button on the remote control and the evening news
mercifully replaces the turkey massacre.
Mom’s shaking her head as she’s walking back into the kitchen. “Wash your hands, we’re going to
eat soon, you moron.”
“Oh good… what’s for dinner? Turkey?”
Mother turns around and tries to glare at me, but she starts laughing with her
“What am I going to do with you?” head shake. We both know on a certain level I can’t
really be blamed too much for what I’ve just done — a strong yet very strange sense of
humour runs in our whole family, so Mom appreciates the joke in that sense.
But she never lets me touch the TV remote control ever again.
I’m glad my mother isn’t a violent person and not prone to throwing TV remote controls into her idiot son’s head.