“Any Day Can Be Thanksgiving” by Jody Callahan
The nuns who raised me said I was born ugly and that it’s best not to hide from the truth. That may be so, but it doesn’t mandate I watch myself chew. I stay away from the seating against the long mirror on the wall. The corner booth is where I go.
They do oatmeal special at this 24-hour diner, cooking it with cream and honey. I had that last time I came here, a year ago. It’s like the menu was created for those of us born with skeletal and jaw problems. Clam chowder, broiled cod, boiled carrots—foods that deliver without crunch. I notice they’ve added occasion meals available year-round, like Thanksgiving turkey with gravy, yellow birthday cake with chocolate frosting, and corned beef St. Patrick’s Day stew.
Conversation’s not my strong suit but I look the waitress in the eye when ordering, even if she doesn’t look back. People examine me when they think I don’t know. I face forward and register their heat from the side. I’m a fly with compound eyes. If at birth God gives every soul a gift, mine’s the ability to sense when I’m being stared at. Wouldn’t be my first choice but intangible gifts aren’t up for exchange.
I eat the oyster crackers that come with the chowder bowl, drowning them first and placing them strategically on my tongue.
I feel the girls looking before I see them. If I could, I’d avoid humans between the ages of twelve and seventeen. There’s a cruelty in teens that crops up when there’s more than one. Not every kid, but enough for me to dread being in their collective orb. When I was young, I’d fight back, but you can’t do that grown. The nuns urged me to find peace in prayer. So, I pray those who taunt me will have an accident and be hideously disfigured themselves.
“What is that?” one whispers. My ears, though misshapen, work just fine. If three girls discuss me diagonally across the diner, I’m going to feel the stabs.
“Oh. My. God. Look over your right shoulder. I mean left. Casually!”
“What am I looking for…is that an actual person?” Two laugh. There’s always laughing, which confuses me. How is ugly funny? The real me is trapped behind a visible wall.
I want to leave. I’d already decided this was the last time, and I was right. Validation of a kind. I signal for the bill.
The laughing girls ask the silent one what she’s doing, and she won’t tell. “You look like you’re on the toilet,” one says. “And can’t go,” the other adds. I sense the silent one weighing her options. What’s something so embarrassing a teen girl won’t admit to friends? “Don’t be such a baby,” they pester, trying to tip her to spill. She gives in with a sigh, cradling her honesty, and says she’s praying—for me.
There’s a stir in my belly like a sharp hunger pang. Is this prayer supposed to be pity? Or is she praying that she never looks like me?
“I’m holding her in my heart,” she says, “and sending good thoughts.”
The first two girls laugh, like they’re unsure of the joke. I think they’re as freaked out as I am. “But why?” one asks.
“Why not?” she answers.
I can tell the first two don’t accept holding nice thoughts for a stranger. Neither do I. She’s got to give us more. I spoon the bottom of the chowder bowl and come up with a hidden clam.
“You know karma, right?”
“Well, duh.”
“What if praying good things for another person comes back to you? What if seeing beauty in others makes you prettier?”
“Ohhhh.” The first two like this. “You’re doing it cause if karma is real, you’ll get prettier?”
“No,” she says, dragging the word out. “I just do it. Thought the karma angle would appeal to superficial assholes like you.”
“Bitch,” one girl says, and we all laugh—them out loud, and me inside. I’m a gargoyle of stone. Worst thing I could do is react. The best defense is pretending my exterior shields against sound.
It gets quiet. I don’t know if everyone’s digesting what was said, or if they’re all holding me in their hearts. It’s weird. I do know one thing though. I don’t send up a prayer for any of them to be in an accident and disfigured. I’m not saying I won’t return to the practice—for now, though, it’s on pause.
The waitress tears off the bill from her pad and places it on my table.
“Please add a birth of cake,” I say.
She looks at the air a few inches above my head. “A slice of birthday cake?”
“Yes.” I grimace, my version of a smile. I get nervous using words out loud and sometimes move them around. I’m a verbal kaleidoscope.
“Candle?” She asks.
I shake my head no. Maybe next year, I think.
Jody Callahan is a fiction finalist in the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and a past recipient of an Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild residency. Her work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Gemini Magazine, and Southword, among others. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
