FOWL HUMOR

Love, Loyalty, and Chicken

And a side of creamy buttered corn

“Can you get me some rotisserie chicken around the corner?” my mother pleaded.

“Mom, you don’t have to beg. You know I’ll get it for you.”

“But you always seem like it’s such a nuisance?”

“It’s just that we always eat the same chicken from Boston Market, touched by the little hands of those teenagers with sailor caps. I know they wear plastic gloves, but it skeeves me out.”

Every Sunday when my father was alive, he took my mom around the corner for some chicken, mashed with brown gravy, and either buttered corn or macaroni and cheese as the side. Unfortunately, my father died of a heart attack at sixty-two, and my mother spent most of her waking hours in doctors' offices with various ailments. Neither one of them ate fruits or vegetables or anything other than a rotisserie chicken.

“You know your dad loved Boston Market. So why don’t we eat there for him?”

“Mom, I don’t mind getting the chicken, but I don’t want to sit in a crowded place with a bunch of dead chickens on roasting spits staring at me.”

Mom went to the bookcase and retrieved her money from behind my father’s wooden urn and a black statue of a Persian cat. She thinks if she’s robbed, no one will go near a dead man’s ashes.

“Mom, you don’t have to give me money for the chicken. I don’t mind paying.”

But she insisted. It’s some manipulative thing, thinking if she foots the bill for food, I won’t put her in the nursing home.

I took the money because of her annoying woeful expression. She was a woman who you felt obliged to agree with no matter what. She had varicose veins in both legs, a turkey neck, and her stockings sagged below her knees.

So I walked around the corner to the Boston Market and tried not to look at the dead chickens. I bought a meal for both of us since she doesn’t like to eat alone. The teenager behind the counter put two half-chicken platters into a plastic bag with handles and asked, “Do you want a brownie or carrot cake with that?”

Since my mother loved brownies, I told the clerk, “Sure, why not,” and walked back to my mother’s apartment with my hot plastic bag of chicken with plastic utensils and extra napkins.

Once again, as we did every Sunday, we sat together in the living room. Me, in my deceased father’s recliner that still had his stale beer scent, and mom on the plastic-covered sofa, putting her plate on a folding table. We ate the same dinner and watched an old Robert Mitchum movie on her Magnavox TV with rabbit ears.

My mother inhaled her rotisserie chicken in a matter of seconds between slurps of Pepsi through a plastic straw. I had a Diet Coke while my father’s ashes sat atop the bookcase next to the statue of a black Persian cat. Even though he had been dead for years, I felt he was watching us, ensuring I was taking care of my mother.

© 2021 Mark Tulin

Here’s another funny one by Mark Tulin: