It's Still Life

Fifteen Minutes on 25 December 1968  (332 words)

It’s Christmas. The one when the White Album came out. It was a Christmas gift. I bought it myself. I mean, I like socks and handmade polyester button up jumpers, well in truth, no I don’t, which why I bought my own gift that year.

Anyway, it’s Christmas, and we’re at my aunt’s house for dinner. She boils her turkeys. Mum is quick to correct me, says it’s steamed. The skin never gets golden like in an oven; it’s more like latex school glue.

My uncle has one of those new electric carving knives, and everyone’s gathered around the anaemic tacky turkey to watch it being sliced. Including Dad, who’s a bit huffy about knives needing electricity to perform what a knife should do without electricity.

While they’re slicing up over there, my aunt’s slicing the cranberry sauce – hers slides out of a tin rather than stirred in a pan like Mum’s. And my cousin and I are impaling black olives on our fingers and making pop-gun sounds as we suck them into our mouth. I don’t know what my little sister is doing, and don’t care – she pinched me in the car and I got yelled at for shouting OUCH because it scared Dad while he was driving.

And as each slice curls and rolls on to the plater, the white meat is increasingly going pink and pinker, Dad says I’m not eating bloody turkey.

You know how people fling about that saying, Time stopped? Well, it did, because that moment is the last memory I have of that day … seeing everyone turn and stare at Dad, Mum gasping, my aunt looking at Mum, and my uncle holding the electric carving knife in the air whilst it continued humming.

I think my cousin and I grabbed the bowl of olives and went to his room to listen to the Beggars Banquet album. It was almost as good as the White Album.

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