Jump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. On the dining room table, covering it all over is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy so I ask, did somebody give this to her? “Give what?” my mom says. The new tablecloth. It’s really nice. My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey. “It wasn’t going to be a tablecloth first,” Mom says. “Your father and I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project.” The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to dismember our dinner. My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?” Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment. “I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane,” Mom says. “We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it.” Give me amnesia. Flash. Give me new parents. Flash. Your mother didn’t want to step on any toes,” Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. “With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn’t want to give people the wrong idea.” My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, “Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism.” She says, “Really these panels are to help the people left behind.” “Strangers are going to see us and see Shane’s name,” my dad says. “We didn’t want them thinking things.” The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce. “I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles,” my mom says. “It’s the nazi symbol for homosexuals.” She says, “Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female pubic hair. The black triangle does.” My father says, “Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute.” My mom says, “We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn’t figure which.” “Yellow,” my father says, “means watersports.” “A lighter shade of blue,” Mom says, “would mean just regular oral sex.” “Regular white,” my father says, “would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear,” He says, “I can’t remember which.” My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside. We’re supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us. “Finally we just gave up,” my mom says, “and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material.” Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, “Do you know about rimming?” I know it isn’t table talk. “And fisting?” my mom asks. I say, I know. “Would you pass the butter, please?” my mother says. To my father she says, “Do you know what felching is?” This, it’s too much. Shane’s dead, but he’s more the centre of attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over Thanksgiving dinner, I can’t take this. It’s just Shane this and Shane that. It’s sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did. The truth is Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he’s dead. I’m good and obedient and I’m ignored. Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he’s good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry. “Listen,” I say. This just blurts out. “Me,” I say. “I’m the last child you people have left alive so you’d better start paying some attention.” Silence. “Felching,” I lower my voice. I’m calm now. “Felching is when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That’s felching. It may or may not,” I add, “include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth.” Silence. Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint. Flash. The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but crunchy on the top. The stuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother the butter. My father clears his throat. “I think ‘fletching’ is the word your mother meant.” He says, “It means to slice the turkey into very thin strips.” Silence. I say, oh. I say, sorry. We eat. © Chapter 7 of Invisble Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk, published by Vintage 2003 | 
