Chicken Nuggets

Chicken nuggets were the girl’s favorite food. Most four-year-olds find a favorite meal they choose to eat obsessively and hers was the dolphin shaped chicken nuggets that her mother bought in the frozen section of the grocery store every Saturday. The girl ate them every day for lunch and though her mother tried to get her to try other foods, she would pick at her plate until someone relented and replaced her meal with the nuggets. And so she ate dolphin shaped nuggets every day, with a side of baked crinkle fries and sometimes green or purple ketchup. She always sat propped in her booster seat on the back porch of her house and regularly watched the trees in her yard sway. She could often hear the buzzing of summertime mosquitoes as they tried to breach the meager defenses provided by the aging porch screen. This Saturday, the girl’s mother was in the kitchen, washing dishes left over from their family lunch, and her father sat next to her at the weak-legged iron table, plate empty and tea glass full, his eyes ever vigilant for trains.

The girl had never understood why her father loved trains as much as he did. He constantly carried a railroad scanner on his belt, leaping up at the slightest crackle in hopes that one of the steel beasts was headed his way. He and the mother had bought the family house mostly because railroad tracks ran right through the back yard. The father even had a special room in the basement where he built train models and wired them with electric parts so they could chug along on the miniature rails of his train set, passing miniature people and miniature animals before pulling into miniature stations with as much strength and ease as the real thing. The girl was never allowed in her father’s special room – he said it was because she was too little and too careless and could break too many things. However, despite her banishment from the one room in the house she could never remember seeing, the girl often crept down into the basement when her mother wasn’t looking to spy on her father through the slats of the old closet door that cordoned off his special room. She often found him sitting at his own father’s desk, quiet and at ease, a pair of large spectacles perched on his nose that magnified his eyes to the size of an owl’s with an X-Acto knife in one hand and a gently molded piece of plastic in the other.

The girl was used to doing this every Saturday, after she had gone grocery shopping with her mother, but today had been different. Today, her father had forgone his weekly tradition of model building to sit with his family for lunch, at the mother’s behest. And so he sat, slowly sipping his tea as his daughter watched him with curiosity and admiration and just a little fear.

“Figures,” the father said suddenly, his gruff voice causing the girl to jump. He turned to look at her but she quickly averted her eyes and continued eating her nuggets.

“What’d you say?” the mother yelled from the kitchen.

“I said it figures.”

“What does?”

“These trains.”

The mother peeped out the porch door and the girl craned around in her booster seat to see what was happening. Her mother’s face was ruined by a frown, the same look the girl received when she disobeyed, and when the mother spoke she used the same irritated voice the girl had grown up hearing. “Yeah, what about them?”

“Well, they’re never here when I am,” the father replied. “When I’m at work, I see probably eight trains a day, but when I’m home, there’s nothing.” The mother nodded and withdrew from the doorway.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Len.”

“Yeah, of course you don’t,” the father muttered just loud enough for the girl to hear. She said nothing and continued eating her nuggets, hyperaware of the tension forming between her parents. The father watched as the girl made the nuggets swim through the air before savagely biting all their heads off. He smiled gently and laughed under his breath, but his face became hard again when he heard the mother speak.

“Maybe you should take a day off, go with John to Palmyra or something. See if you guys can find any trains.”

“Well, you see, Diane, I’d love to do that, but I have to go to work and earn this family some money.”

“You’re not the only one with a job, Leonard,” the mother snapped, appearing in the doorway again. “Take a day off and go. Otherwise I’ll never hear the end of your complaining.”

The father’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.” She left the doorway and the girl heard cupboards slam open and shut, pans and dishes rattling dangerously as the mother took her anger out on something less likely to defend itself. The father chose not to answer and sank back into his chair, every crevice in his lined face brimming with anger. The girl quietly decapitated another nugget and smeared its headless body with purple, ketchupy blood. The father watched her slowly tear the nugget apart and the girl threw herself into the work of eating, afraid to look at him. His face had been hard and weathered for as long as she could remember, and his expression was always one of quiet contempt for all that surrounded him, except for her. His face was a clear indication of everything he felt, and he became especially gruesome when he was mad. It scared the girl to see her father mad, and she could tell he was mad now.

Slowly, after a few minutes, the tension in the air relaxed and the girl could tell her father was returning to normal. She chanced a look at him and saw that he was smiling.

“How’re those nuggets, kid?”

“Good,” the girl said brightly, “but I think I’m full.”

“Aw, are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Positive?”

She nodded. The father shook his head and made a sad face.

“That’s an awful shame.” Her brow knit together.

“Why?”

“Well, because those nuggets know how much you like them.”

“Yeah?”

“And they like you too, you know.”

The girl smiled stupidly. “Really?”

“Yeah, but they’re sad because you don’t want to finish eating them.”

The girl looked at her plate and felt her body flood with guilt.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh,” the father said. “Look.” He picked up one of the nuggets and made it stand on its trail, facing its nose towards his daughter. “Why won’t you finish eating me?” he asked in a high pitched voice as he simulated the dolphin’s words.

The girl frowned sadly. “Because I’m full.”

“Oh, we’re so sad that you won’t eat us,” the father continued, making the dolphin dance on its tail. “We love you, but you don’t love us, or else you’d eat us.” The girl’s face contorted into a mask of sadness and she began to hear the rushing noise that always preceded her tears.

“Please, eat us,” the father said.

“Daddy, don’t,” the girl whimpered.

“Eat us!” he continued. “We want to be in your tummy!”

All of a sudden, the girl burst out crying as she grabbed the nugget from her father’s hand, forcing it into her mouth. The father stared senselessly as she took a second and a third, eating them as quickly as possible. Finally, she fell silent as she stared at the last nugget on her plate. With a shaking hand, she reached forward, picked up the nugget, and shoved the entire thing down her throat, forcing herself to swallow it whole despite the waves of nausea that had begun to ripple throughout her body.

“There, was that so bad?” the father asked, smiling as he settled back into his chair. The girl shook her head but her stomach was roiling. She was quiet for a while before she heard her father say, “Sweetie, are you okay?” She shook her head, putting her small hands on her even smaller stomach and she tried to quell her urge to vomit. The father’s question brought the mother back to the porch door, checking to see if her daughter was okay.

“Mommy, I don’t feel good,” the girl said weakly. She had barely finished her sentence before she felt the food moving back up her throat and she threw up all over the porch table. The father leapt back to escape the spray while the mother came forward, putting her hand on her daughter’s back. The girl started to cry again, only stopping to continue throwing up. The mother continued to rub the girl’s back until finally she collapsed, too weak from her sickness to hold herself up.

“Jesus,” the mother said, picking her daughter up out of the booster seat. She cradled the girl in her arms as the child sobbed into her shoulder, vomit dappling the fair skin around her mouth. “Len, what the hell happened?”

The girl caught a glimpse of her father’s face as she was rushed to the bathroom; his entire body seemed to lose its rigidity and the playful glint went out of his eyes, giving way to a more intense stare that the girl could not identify.

“I’m sorry,” she heard him say quietly, his voice fading away. “I was just trying to get her to eat.”