La dinde s’enfuit

Bridget had a nightmare about the Christmas turkey. It was the first frightening dream she could remember since the other sort-of nightmare about Kelly’s angel-food cake. Her father had just cut into the bird when it leaped off the table, still hot and crackling from the oven, screaming « Don’t you dare ! Don’t you dare ! » Trailing stuffing across the kitchen floor.

One of those dreams where she was able to tear herself awake before it could scare her anymore. She made herself get out of bed. It was 8:25 in the morning, and she stood there in a softened beam of sunshine, filtering in through the patterned curtains, illuminating the floating dust. Christmas light, warming her. The words in her head were : How do you be dead ?—which was the first thing she had thought after The Birth. But it hadn’t really been a thought at all. It was bigger. It was this primal, fundamental wish that the sentence didn’t do justice to. The word that came closest to doing it justice wasn’t even God. There was no word. Just this prehistoric need to turn herself off. There had been crying (not from her, the wah-wah), and heated sheets which felt so good and people saying she could hold it, hold him, hold the wah-wah, and all she could think about was this thing she wasn’t that wasn’t even God.

Help God No, she thought now, standing in the muted sunshine.