Meat Masks

Every time I carve 5oz of tender chicken breast from a warm Giant Eagle or Walmart Rotisserie Chicken, I think about Vada Sultenfuss, the young girl from the movie My Girl.

I think about the mundane mendacity of morbid things. Every day, dead human bodies lie as they lay in stasis, motionless in funeral parlor basements. That’s not your mom. It’s the meat computer her thoughts and feelings used to use to ambulate her through life and eventually into the Great Beyond. Let’s put some makeup on it.

I think about a father who deals with the loss of his wife by diving deep into the torso of a 68-year-old heart attack victim instead of sparing one look at his beautiful daughter. Every day she looks more and more like his dead wife. She even sings like her mother. She’s invisible to him until she gets in the way.

I think about how Vada’s mom left and her dad replaced her with a nice-enough post-mortem makeup artist. Does she wear the same makeup that she puts on corpses? Gross.

I think about the ways that growing up in a house where death pays the bills must shape a person. Everyone dies and you will too. People move on so why can’t you? You’re not normal. The anxiety of it all. No wonder she’s an overthinker and a hypochondriac. Lean into the strangeness and scare away all of the neighborhood boys, except Thomas.

I think about first periods and how navigating them without a mother would feel. As scary as death floating and fusing with the heat in the air ducts before settling as dust on the lintel above your bedroom door. It becomes a part of you because how could it not? That’s not a female rite of passage, it’s internal bleeding and you’d better get it checked out before you hemorrhage all of the blood your mother gave you onto the antiseptic white tile floor. Death is catching.

I think about love that is lost. Where does it go? Is it finite? Does it move to someone else or did it just bury and mask itself with fear or anger or worry? A full face of makeup on cold gray skin. She never wore that much when she was alive.

I think about how she must feel. Vada is afraid. Vada is angry. Vada thinks that her death is imminent. A chicken bone lodged in the throat. It’s scratchy. Bees in the fallen hive. They’re sting-y. He lost his glasses but found her mood ring. It’s black now.

I recently heard somewhere that grocery stores actually lose money on the rotisserie chickens even though they now seem smaller and cost $6.99. I’ll enter the store and make a beeline to the heated shelves just past the produce section to grab a quick lunch. Just under the surface of my meat mask, I am aware that in less than 30 minutes I’ll be ruminating about piercing esophagi and colons with the needle-edge of a chicken’s fibula. What a cheap way to go.