The Moment of Escape
The fine-large tom-turkey savoured the swell of grain in his overstuffed gullet. ‘Don’t y’ll just love the winter? Cold-short days, endless rations, sleeping critter-safe in a heated barn.’
The flock nodded and pecked, guzzling fast before the sun — which was hanging like a burnt tangerine over the distant blue mountains — sank into tomorrow.
Beyond the ten-foot-high chicken-wire fence, a gaggle of motheaten pigeons ogled the grain as it rained from the plastic dispenser every time a microchipped turkey ducked into range.
‘I had a dream last night,’ slurred the fine-large tom-turkey side-eyeing the famished pigeons. ‘About a world where turkeys held elections and voted for stuff — like feathered fences, so scruffy, useless, feckless squabs couldn’t taint our vittles by eyeballing them all the while.’
A small-speckled hen-turkey standing apart from the flock, shook her rose-red wattles and scratched some grain out through the fence. The dove-grey pigeons fell a-pecking.
‘Hey!’ screeched the fine-large tom-turkey in tones more Corvidae than Galliform, ‘That’s poultry-only!’ but the small-speckled hen-turkey stood firm.
‘Self-interest is unbecoming to the season,’ she chirped. ‘The songs the farmer plays on loop to forestall predators, speak of generosity and goodwill to all. Don’t they inspire you to be a little… bigger?’
The fine-large tom-turkey cocked his snood and without breaking eye contact with the small-speckled hen turkey, sidled to the dispenser where he dipped his beak to unleash a long-long torrent of grain then, moving super-duper oh so slowly, he swallowed one. Single. Speck.
The small-speckled hen-turkey ignored the gesture and held his gaze as she extended a clipped wing toward the fenced-in world.
‘Don’t you ever wonder about all this? Us stuffed full while others starve,’ she lifted a claw to kick more grain toward the listening pigeons. ‘Especially since the Thanksgiving disappearances?’ .
‘Paradise-denying little flea beetle!’ screeched the fine-large tom-turkey, shaking his impressive tail feathers so they rattled like snakes, then he aimed a vicious peck at her parson’s nose. She saw it coming and dodged it easily but was more than a little relieved when the light-sensitive barn door started its nightly rattle toward closure, prompting the whole flock to flounce inside.
As usual, the small-speckled hen-turkey hovered on the threshold in the dying light, the last to go. She watched the pigeons flap over the fence and gobble up the wasted grain. Though she spoke not one coo of Columbidae, she recognised gratitude when she heard it before the door clanged itself shut. The looped music started up its Silent Night as the small-speckled hen turkey keeping herself to herself hopped onto to her usual roost, slightly away from the rest of the turkeys.
She nestled down into the sweet-safe straw for what would prove to be the final time and just before she fell asleep, her mind soared up through the corrugated roof, out beyond into the cold crisp evening, imagining its way to the unclipped pigeons as they winged into a molten sunset, watching as they became tiny black specks in an ocean of red, and for a ghost of a glimpse of a gasp of a moment she felt free, free, free as a bird.
Author: Jan Kaneen has been writing short and very short fiction since 2015. Her stories have won prizes in places like Molotov, NFFD & Bath Flash and most recently the 2023 Bath novella-in-flash comp. Her winning story, A Learning Curve, is on sale now from Ad Hoc Fiction and her dark and unsettling short story collection will be published by Northodox Press in 2025.
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