Mama's Feast

I eat my young. It's actually quite economical to do so. As they say, youth is wasted on the young. I find that it tastes pretty good with a little bit of hoisin sauce.

However, after a while, the hot flashes come, and the suitors stop calling, and there's no more babies to be eaten. And all your friends know about your proclivities, so they keep theirs away from you. Though there was that time with my girlfriend Agnes; her boy was a mean one. Went down like a fistful of habaneros.

Usually, the babies that turn out all right... I don't touch them. My best and brightest are doctors and lawyers and rocket scientists, and yes, they too eat their young. One of my daughters swears that it keeps her young-looking to eat them as they emerge from her body. I'm sure that its keeping her flexible, at least.

Last week, I had one of my children over for a feast. He was one of the ones that seemed to be all right at first, but after time had become somewhat of an embarrassment to me. He'd left his children in several wombs, not offering to eat or raise any one of them. He broke hearts regularly, stole money occasionally, and lied constantly.

It was time to recycle him.

I'd stuffed him with a meal infused with all the love I ever felt for the boy. I made the dough for the piecrust while thinking of his transition from baby to boy to man, and all the times I could have eaten him but decided not to. I filled his glass with wine bottled the year he was born. I regaled him with tales of his father, who I'd known but briefly, but whose features were replicated with eerie likeness in his own face.

He got slow and stumbled around. I took him by the hand and led him to the couch to rest off the feast. As I fetched his favorite afghan from the closet, I heard him muttering to himself.

"I'm so sorry, Mother. I know I'm a disappointment."

I tucked him all around, my embodiment of disappointment and fierce love and forgotten desire. I kissed him on the head. "I love you," I said, reaching behind me for the axe.

He never knew what hit him.

The next night was Mama's Feast, shared with my other children, in a bustling kitchen of heat, steam, and memory.

leslie powell

minneapolis mn