The Last Thanksgiving: A Story Sutured from Electric Nightmares
Text by: Paula D. Ashe
Images: The Internet (Starry AI Generator – prompts by Gavin Bragdon, excluding final image by Paula D. Ashe)
Special Thanks: Danielle Haspel and Christopher Ropes, for their feedback
Author’s Note: Initially, this was supposed to be a ‘funny’ little collection of vignettes inspired by that unmistakable ‘style’ of AI generated art: images of weird, smear-faced humanoids in uncanny settings. The vibes are always of both nostalgia and hyperreality, composite living spaces cobbled together from the digital detritus of forgotten photographs, served up as pseudomemories regenerated through automated comparison and collection.
I enjoy them for their eeriness. The method of their construction and the images themselves are the very stuff of ontological and hauntological nightmare. Who are these non-people in these not-houses eating not-food with their not-families?
They are (literal) bits of all of us. Every photograph ever uploaded returns to us in strange, shadowy assemblages, sometimes tweaked with the fantastical and otherworldly.
So, what started as something simple became something bigger and a bit more complicated. I hope for two things: 1.) That you ‘enjoy’ it (as best you can, you know how I do) and 2.) That you enjoy this holiday season. It is not lost on me that for many people, this is a painful time of mourning. Personal losses hit harder, gain a new sharpness during the holidays.
Please take care of yourself.
One last thing (I promise): originally I was going to hide this behind a paywall but I found the process too cumbersome. I value my work so if you get something from this tale, please pick up a copy of We Are Here to Hurt Each Other if you haven’t already, or share it as you see fit.
Thanks y’all and happy holidays.
Part 0: November 26th 2018
Hi everyone. I’m Sarah, Jess’ cousin. Sorry to post on her page but I’m not sure what else to do. I haven’t seen her in three days and don’t know how else to get a hold of her. She showed up at our place the day after Aunt Mary’s funeral a few nights ago. We talked for a while and then it got late, I went to sleep, and woke up the next day and she was gone. Sorry, this is scattered. I just don’t know what to do.
I’m sending this out in the hopes that maybe somebody, somewhere can help us find her. So far she’s only been gone three days but wherever she went…she left everything behind. Her job, her apartment, her car, her phone, laptop, and her cat. I only really knew about her life from here on Facebook, and mostly she just posted about the cat. That’s the part that really scares me, that she left him. “Please keep him safe, Sarah.” That’s the only handwritten note she left. It was in an envelope with some money, I guess for Silas’ care. (Before anyone asks I will be keeping him for the time being, Dave and I are pet people and we’ll take good care of him no matter what. He’s a sweet boy.)
Jess left her phone at my house the night before she went missing and I found everything below in a document she made. I’ll just say it, it knocked the breath out of me. There’s so much here I wanted to forget, so much I didn’t want to know. Please look at the images. You probably don’t want to invite this kind of stuff into your head anymore and I don’t blame you — I’ll admit I only looked at a few but you’ll learn why as you read — but I don’t know what else to do. I know now that there were a lot of us who grew up in Branson’s Ferry who caught glimpses of things we never should have seen. I learned real early on not to talk about it, to lie about it even. I wish Jess understood why I did the things I did. I wish I could tell her that I didn’t mean to leave her alone with it. We were kids and after what happened to Dad…I had to learn how to live inside my own self again and pretending things were different was the only way I knew how.
Anyway.
My cousin’s name is Jessica ‘Jess’ Fraser. She’s thirty-six or thirty-seven years old (I can’t remember her birthday, sorry) and she’s from Branson’s Ferry, Ohio. She’s white, about 5’7, somewhat overweight, with brown eyes and dark hair usually pulled back in a ponytail. She has a lip ring and a nose ring, I think. She usually wears a hoodie with the hood up. For reasons you’ll soon understand, there are no pics of Jess, save the one from when we were kids and the one at the end that isn’t all that helpful. As soon as I get a chance I’ll get someone to draw her so at least people have something to go on. Please feel free to contact me via private message and share this everywhere you can.
Whatever this is, I know she wanted folks to see it. If I couldn’t do anything else, I can at least do that for her.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Sarah Caldwell
Part I: Thanksgiving 1986
He posed with us just at the moment his presence lacerated the air. It was so fast we couldn’t even react. Aunt Tanya was telling everyone to ‘pipe down’ for the picture and then the world gasped and spoiled at the wound of his entrance. He appears in several family’s photographs from around here, dating back to the fifties, but only after they’ve been digitized. The negatives are as mundane as the ripples in canned cranberry sauce, but then you scan it and he’s there. And if your family’s standing in the picture he stands too and if like us you’re seated, he’s nestled behind the table like a sheepishly late visitor. Try it sometime, Ferry folk. It may not be him but it’ll be one of them, somewhere. Sometimes they’re hard to see but I honestly think they like being seen.
He could have materialized anywhere, why did he choose to sit between me and Sarah?
Sarah, Jesus.
One minute her dad’s copping a not-so-sneaky feel on his date and the next minute his grinning face is bubbling onto the back of her lilac sweater.
They tried to put Sarah in an institution but by then they were all full with ‘worse’ cases. Mom and Aunt Tanya never let me go with them, I had to stay home with her and Tanya’s worthless ass daughter, Beth-Ann. She was lazy teenaged lump on the couch while I watched Sarah. What the hell was a mildly traumatized seven old supposed to do with another — yet more severely — traumatized seven year old? Sarah was already messed up cause her mom died a little after she was born and then this. I guess Aunt Tanya and mom were at fault too. Anyway, all she did was stare at the walls and rock back and forth, chewing on the ends of her hair. It would get all slimy and look like straw. She’d forget sometimes and a bit of wet hair would brush her neck and she’d scream until she passed out. We took down all the pictures of Uncle Mike and Mom cut Sarah’s hair.
After that, like a lot of folks, we didn’t do Thanksgiving for a long time. All that was left to give thanks for were our distant relatives who died quietly and not in ribbons. Traditions can stifle as much as they comfort. Years wore on and we carried our brokenness in our own ways. The strangeness seeped in. And somehow, some of us forgot and celebrated Thanksgiving again.
Part II: Thanksgiving 1992
“The children won’t eat unless the meat’s still screaming.” The below picture isn’t of my family, but it was one of the more well-known ones when they started the inquest. I obviously didn’t know what that meant until a lady from CPS came to my school and asked me to tell her what was happening. I was eleven and we hadn’t celebrated anything in six years. “How do you know that? Ab—about the screaming? How do you know?” Only now does it occur to me how fucked up that was, but it was the nineties; I didn’t even tell my mom. Although, as long as my grades didn’t slip and I reminded her when the bottom shelf of the fridge was low on Little Kings, I could’ve set a dog on fire in front of her and she wouldn’t have cared. The CPS lady was so scared she could barely look at me. The printout trembled in her hand. Years later I saw the original; a bunch of greedy looking kids eyeballing a perfectly roasted turkey while their dad balanced the serving plate and chuckled. I did tell Sarah though, we were still close back then. “You don’t know?” She said, her eyes glassy from whatever meds my mom and Aunt Tanya gave her. I shook my head. “They ate that girl last Thanksgiving. Her dad skinned her alive and chopped her up and put her on a big plate. Those other kids were her brothers and sisters.” I shook my head. “How do you even know that, Sarah?” She shrugged. “Everybody knows that except the grownups, like how you knew that ‘the children won’t eat unless the meat’s still screaming.’ That’s what you told that lady, right?” My mouth opened and closed without sound. I hadn’t told Sarah that part. “We all know, Jess. The trick is to keep knowing.”
That night, I tossed and turned in bed and remembered that that missing girl, Rebecca Collier, had been in my kindergarten class and if I thought hard enough I could see familiar streaks of her even on a plate made heavy with her raw and marbled countenance.
Part III: Thanksgiving 1997
Sarah’s new boyfriend is named Dave and he’s too old for her and too weird but she’s sleeping again and even laughs sometimes so nobody says anything. It’s the third Thursday in November and we’re trying to just have a normal day but Dave comes over with a ‘duck’ he says he found near the lake behind his apartment complex. Everyone thinks its a duck but I can see what it isn’t and it cries with a child’s voice and says it remembers what Dave did to it when it was smaller. He lets it loose in our backyard and everyone laughs while it waddles around sobbing. My mom laughs so hard her drink sloshes out of her glass and she almost falls over trying to save it. I fucking hate Dave. Whatever he’s done to Sarah has made her forget and now I’m the only one who knows. I ask Dave what he did to it and he just chuckles like a moron and says, “I was just playing around.”
Every time he lies about it, I watch him grow an extra finger.
Part IV: Thanksgiving 2002
Noe wants me to go back to BF to visit with her folks for the holiday. She knows some of what I’ve seen, but I haven’t told her everything. We learned we had the same hometown during one of those stupid icebreaker sessions in an English class our sophomore year before I dropped out. We started talking and somehow didn’t stop.
I told her about Rebecca Collier and Sarah’s meds and why I don’t sleep. She said she had never experienced the same, but she always new something was ‘off’ about Badshit Fairy. But she wasn’t scared of me when I told her. She didn’t leave. In fact, not long after that she moved into my apartment.
I guess her family knows she’s queer and are okay with it, which is a relief. I don’t know if I want to see my family. I told my mom I’m a lesbian but she was hammered and hasn’t brought it up since. Aunt Tanya said she always knew (thanks) and she would keep praying for me (double thanks). Beth-Ann just rolled her eyes. Sarah said she was happy for me.
Sarah lives with Dave and they go to church and she tells everyone Uncle Mike had a particularly violent and fatal seizure at Thanksgiving dinner all those years ago. The kids who were around back then know this isn’t true but as adults they’re too worn down to care. My mom still won’t celebrate the holiday but she doesn’t celebrate much of anything anymore. The call center’s closed so I don’t have to work until Monday. I have no excuse and Noe knows it. I’m gonna take my own car, Noe can take hers. It’ll hurt her feelings but if my family freaks out or hers freaks out for whatever reason, I just want a way to get out of there fast. I’m being paranoid but…I don’t put anything past Thanksgiving.
It’ll be fine.
Her cousin Sharon brought it into their home like that. I felt my eyes grow wide and Noe looked at me and I know she saw it too, just for a second. The doors were wide open but she blinked and slammed them shut. It was too much. If you let that in you have to let everything else in and it never stops. I don’t believe in ghosts because people don’t haunt people. It’s the knowing that haunts you. She left me alone with her lovely, accepting family and the thing her cousin brought convulsing in its bowl. It shuddered and screamed, black skin rippling like dried pudding. They all laughed with mouths too wide as Sharon shoved her forearms into its cavity and pulled something living and infant-like from the carcass. They cheered. Noe reached over and grabbed my hand. Sharon shouted and set the infant-like thing into her shoulder. It stuck there in some impossible arrangement of physics. They all sat back down around the table and Noe gently pulled me back into my seat. “Almost forgot!” Sharon called, all chipper while the parasitic infant swiveled beside her like some awful goddamn parrot. The thing in the bowl gave one last spasm of afterbirth and from it floated a new face. Sharon put it on over her old face. The family picked up their drinks to cheer as Sharon sat back down, both her face and her infant misshapen and seeping. Noe looked at me and smiled, leaned over and said, “We never stopped celebrating because we cherish all his gifts. You could celebrate with us too, Jess.”
I tore my hand out of hers and ran to my car.
That night she called and I didn’t answer but she left a message I’ve never forgotten: “Hey, listen, I’m sorry about what happened. I should have told you what to expect but I didn’t think you’d come if you knew. I shouldn’t have lied and I’m sorry I did. You think you’re so alone, but you don’t have to be. You aren’t even, really! You know that, right? They can see us, all the time. We can only see them digitized for some reason. I don’t really understand it, but one of my cousins posted a family pic of us on Thanksgiving when we were kids and there was a man standing next to me and he had so many mouths with so many teeth. He visits every year and he brings us gifts. Blessings, really. And we’re so happy and I…Jess I want you to be happy too. The way you are just breaks my heart. You’re so sweet and funny, you could have such a good, full life. Even after what happened my parents still like you! The machine should have cut me off by now but it won’t, that’s another gift. Things bend the way I want them to. Not always, but sometimes. Especially around this time of year. I hoped for you, you know? I hoped for you and I thought that maybe he sent you to me. I’m not trying to scare you or anything, I just want you to know what you’re missing out on. You think you’re alone but you’re not. He could be there with you right now. I hope someday you look up and see him and I hope he sends you back to me.”
I’ll live in my car until I find a new place.
Part V: Thanksgiving 2018
Of course mom’s funeral was today. This day. It was the only day everyone was free and we figured since we didn’t celebrate it, it didn’t matter. I’m not sure how I’m meant to feel. It feels over. My pdoc says the med changes over last six months have yielded ‘remarkable results’. Namely that I’m not on the edge of losing my mind all the time. Thing is, I still see them. They’re everywhere now but they’ve become more selective about where and how they reveal themselves. I don’t know what it means . Honestly, the meds made it easy not to care.
Then mom got sick. I knew it would happen, that’s a guarantee with 30+ years of alcoholism under your belt. I knew it would happen but it still knocked me off my orbit.
Noe came to the gathering with her wife, which felt great (it didn’t). “I’m sorry about your mom.” She said after telling her wife to wait for her in the car. She was like a raven; all black iridescence and gleaming. All I could do is nod and then words came out of me that I meant but didn’t intend to say aloud. “He send you her, too?” Noe gave me a strange look that passed quickly. “No, no I don’t think so. But I waited for you, for a while. Longer than I should have.” One of Beth Ann’s litter bumped into me while running from one room to the next. I cursed at them and they just giggled and kept running. “Well, I guess this is what catching up with you is like, then.” She said and hitched her designer purse higher up on her shoulder. “Oh hey, sorry I’m not more entertaining at my own mother’s funeral. Get fucked, Noe.” She quirked her mouth and I knew exactly what she was going to say before she said it. “Oh we will. After dinner with the folks. We came back to celebrate the holiday and I heard about your mom and wanted to pay my respects. I shouldn’t have bothered.” I stared out the window instead of looking at her. Her Beamer was like a spaceship trapped in a junkyard. I heard her walk away and then she stopped . “Take a look at yourself sometime Jess. You know how I mean.” I turned to her then. “Why do you think you could see them in the first place?” She left finally and it felt like a knife sliding out. Someone else soon filled the space with idle chatter and awkward sympathy.
Her words hounded me all night until the next morning. I took a pic of myself with my phone for the first time.
And the last.
The End
Ooohhh I really liked this. And in an unrelated sense, what's scary is how fast AI imagery is getting better quality. It would be hard to get things this obviously bad anymore. Without asking for it.
This is beautiful