Meat the Parents
When the baby was three days old we slipped her into a purse and let her have her way. She squealed and insisted we bring her to the riverbank, threatening to disown us if her demands went unmet. We stood back, waving, as she sailed down the billowing river. She said goodbye with her tiny infant hands, chubby fingers flailing like sausages in the wind.
We got a call about two days later that she’d arrived at the F. Fisher Mall. We beamed and swept away watery beads of pride from our eyes. Our little girl, the entrepreneur. With the coins we tucked into her spare diaper she had started her very own small business. A store, the lady on the phone told us, set out to market cloth ornamented by meat patterns. Bacon dish towels and roast beast aprons! Chicken finger pantaloons and breast of pheasant peasant skirts! The best-seller, so far, had been the meatball underwear set. Such an innovator, our little girl. Over the phone we requested a box of the very best products the shop had to offer to be shipped overnight to our front door.
In the morning it came; a reproduction of her mother’s wedding dress and my own marriage tuxedo, both cut from a fine fabric sprinkled in pepperoni print. We wept caviar tears and opened a bottle of wine, early as it was. To the baby! We cried. We donned the attire and recreated our ceremony of holy matrimony, sans an officiator or any other superfluous guests. To honor our daughter we made the event a carnivorous one and roasted pot-bellied pig in the fireplace throughout the service. It was a crowned feast, that sow. We named it after our daughter and severed its head under the light of the moon. In our meaty cloaks we skinned and throttled the beast between our teeth. Mashing, gnawing, chortling from our guts til we had been married another year yet.
We learned to live like that, all blood-stained hands and whittled-bone furniture. Our baby could never visit— too stuffed up with work, scheduling, fraternizing, et cetera. We oozed with pride anyway. She shipped us troves of goods for holidays and we would strut through town clad in pork chop sweaters and minced meat berets. When the baby turned sixteen we taxidermied three raccoons in her image, each fashioned to represent one of the three blessed days we had spent together at the beginning of her life. And what a life it was.
When we finally grew old and wilted and eventually passed on, it was time to return to our baby. We had our bodies boiled and our flesh chunked into small squares. All were wrapped in plastic cling wrap and placed in a container of dry ice, sent off by dear friends down the river and to the F. Fisher Mall.
When our baby received us in that river-worn box, she examined our remains long and hard before burying us deep underground. In our honor she crafted a series of geriatric diapers marked by our cubes of flesh. Through our daughter and her enterprise we live on, gently, meat beating against the tide of the river.
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Oriana Mack (she/her) is a dark fiction writer from New Haven Connecticut. She recently graduated from Bard College with a degree in Written Arts, and since then has delved into the world of teaching and child psychology. She is interested in working through the complicated, universal dynamics that develop between parents and children through her writing, finding angles of humor and darkness to illuminate the complexity of at all. When she is not writing, you can find her fiddling, singing, eating jellybeans, and binging the latest and greatest HBO Max series.