The feast is in the season of summer, when the sun stays out the longest and you can be outdoors in cloth coverings that show off the most bendy parts of your limbs. We begin preparations just before dusk. My sister and I act as go-betweens, bringing the raw flesh patties from our mother in the house at the cold-box by the indoor stove to our father outside at the outdoor stove. Our father will char the flesh, sometimes too much. (“Nothing can hurt you if you cook it long enough,” he likes to say. “Including people.”) 

He covers the cooked flesh with sheets of old yellow milk and then brings it to the wood table shielded from the fading sun by the umbrella. Our mother brings the plants she has sliced to adorn the flesh before we encase it in grains. The plants weren’t grown by us. Everyone knows we can’t grow anything to pull out of the ground in our yard. Too much pee, from the beasts who live with us in the house, which are different from the beasts we eat. After we finish our flesh and adornments, we gather around the dying flames to pierce sweet foam cubes with especially pointy tree-slivers, char them until they drip, and press them into sweet grains with rich dark melted bean-sugar. We cannot eat these creations without leaving their marks on our skin, marks that must be scrubbed from our faces and cloth coverings later. 

 In the background, musical notes sit in the air like the breeze, interrupted by explosions in the distance. The explosions escalate as the sky grows dark, but we do not fear them, save the beasts who live with us. Past our defensive picket barrier, we can see the playground, other houses, other yards. Colorful fabric waving on posts, cyclic spikes of tinfoil spinning on sticks, plumes of smoke identical to the one issuing from the outdoor stove rise above the other yards. We may not feast together, but this night in July, we all feast.

Heather Talty is a writer, editor, and dog person from New York. Her short humor and fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Points in Case, The Belladonna, HAD, and Nonbinary Review, among others. She occasionally tweets @heathertalty.