Nuclear Winter: Holiday Dinner Reimagined

We sat in the fallout of last year’s gift exchange— smashed angel centerpiece taped back together as good as a rogue bomb if someone mentioned it. Our voices dragged like anchors through an ocean— low, cold, summoning something older than Kris Kringle. I strained to recall a time when it wasn’t like this. The kitchen table— a battleship, whipped tension and potatoes. Dad’s knife slipped once, then twice. Mammaw clutched her rosary, counting sins like beads of gravy on the drop-cloth. The whiskey isn’t worth your soul, she whispered. Our air was burned sugar— a water pie, depression-era relic left too long in the oven. As they say, it’s the ingredients you have that bake the cake. Mom whispered, Let’s just get through it. The corners of her mouth disappeared— I knew better. When my sister reached for a biscuit, I grabbed her wrist—too hard. Mine, I hissed. The room turned quiet, the kind of silence snow wears before an avalanche. By sunset, half of us were crying— over the ruined pie, or the family tree we couldn’t stop cutting down. When I reimagine it— and I always do— I don’t erase or the snowfall or the tension. Instead, I break the bread without a flinch, leave my sister’s wrist unmarked. Dad’s carving hand steadies, and in my version, we get grandma drunk— the old broad needed to lighten up. The angel still shatters— but this time we laugh, our elbows knocking it over reaching for seconds. In the end, we huddle closer, ash still falling, we celebrate cold on the other side of the door. Our hands stay sticky, glue healing the angel’s cracked wings, sugar crystallizing our fingerprints— we press lightly, only to test for doneness, we are patient, we watch as snow smothers our wreckage— call it DNA, an elegy.