Billy and the Turkey
Shoot
A Thanksgiving Story
By Danny Tillman
The Knife Lady
Raschelle Raschette woke up late with another terrible hangover. Was it daylight again? What day was it? For that matter, what month and year? It had been this way for 10 years: Wild nights and hangovers, facing blurry days with regrets, shame and anger. Always anger came to get her through 'til night time again. There, inside of anger, she could hide under the cover of darkness, wearing it as a cloak to mask her worthless life and her destructive deeds. And that cloak had become her living shroud. And the knives: She reached under her pillow for one. Her shaking fingers grasped a long broad sharp shining piece of steel and threw it with all her might at the mirror staring at her across the room from the foot of her bed. The blade point exploded through the glass, pierced the dresser backboard and came to rest 2 inches inside the bedroom wall just behind it, leaving behind a comet tail of shards. "Take that, you terrible person!" she screamed as she killed herself in effigy. But something new was nagging at the back of her brain. Something about a couple of neighbor kids who lived back through the woods in that white house by the hard road. Was it yesterday? A Thanksgiving invite? Was today Thanksgiving? Did they still have Thanksgiving, and if they did, why did they? What was Thanksgiving all about anyway? "Something about Indians, Turkeys and Pilgrims I think." The thought of appearing anywhere during daylight around people was out of the question. "I wouldn't fit in." Then she thought about the gold and cash her Pa had left her…Enough for a lifetime without having to work for a living. She reached under the edge of her mattress and pulled out a second Jim Bowie-style knife which she placed on the bed. Her old Pa had left her several and she never felt secure without one of them nearby. Hence she kept them hidden around the house.
She then rolled off the bed and crawled over to the dresser, cutting her knees and elbows on the broken glass, pulling herself up and yanking the knife out of the backboard and the wall. She found something else she kept all around the house called Ron Rico 151 which she took to cure her headaches and nausea and just about everything else. Just one swallow and she was thinking clearer and returning to that fuzzy secure world she had made her home in ever since her Pa had left her. Those kids had wandered past her house. When was it…yesterday?
She had been sitting on the porch with her bottle and her Bowie knife and all secure in her fuzzy world when they came by. "Miss Raschelle Ma'am, you're invited to Thanksgiving dinner at our house tomorrow at 2:00 ." Me! Invited to Thanksgiving! That was a first. Then…today must be Thanksgiving Day. "But I can't go! I don't socialize with nobody but night people."