Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Chris Gavaler
Recipe for Giblets
It’s better that you’re divorced, estranged, not sociopathic
necessarily, but no one’s mailing you get well cards with your grandkids’
snapshots and crayon art. Your name isn’t hand copied into anyone’s
personal address book. It’s Thanksgiving, so you’re on your own again.
McDonald’s is closed. IHOP is closed. Red Lobster, with its giant pusfilled
offspring-eating insects, is closed. Unless you can stomach resimmered
Chinese buffet, you have your freezer to forage, packages
of cheap meats that have been diced, compacted, and submerged in
crumbs and boiling oil. There’s also a Heineken Dark crusted to the
bottom shelf of your fridge, a made-to-export dye-doctored lager left
from the six pack you bought yourself last Christmas—which is to say
that your faults do not include a biological dependency on alcohol, a
non-inheritance your grandson will cherish more than the $7,400 in
your savings account. He’s two. You’ve not met him.
Some men would make excuses: your father burning alive in a
tenement fire, your mother cooking you horse meat, brains, cow
blood, while starving herself. It was the thirties. You gurneyed corpses
in Korea, matched limbs to heaps of intestines. You had an appetite
for younger women and so walked out on your wife and kids. Now
you’re reconciled to these leftover years. You woke this morning with
Mylanta crusted on your lips, the non-metaphorical holes in your
stomach burning.
After showering and fingering the expanding mole on your right
shoulder, you dress with your back to the mirror and heat a mug of
instant coffee in the microwave. Whiffs of sausage grease seep under
the apartment door. You breathe through your mouth. You have
nowhere to go so you go for a ride, windows down, radio up, seat belt
loose. There’s a news segment about relief workers handing out free
turkeys on an Indian reservation. You spin the dial, settle for classical,
something Bach-like, a requiem maybe. You don’t see the tractor
trailer. The driver is hungover, the front of his skull pulsing as he jams
the wheel into the turn too hard. Empty poultry cages skip across the
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