Prandial Peril

The Mr. Potato Head toy smiled at me. He had a mustache, bulging eyes, a pink nose, a black top hat, a big smile, blue shoes.

"This is you," said the doctor. She smashed the Mr. Potato Head down against linoleum, sending plastic arms, feet, mustache and Mr. Potato ass flying in all directions. "That's you if you don't start eating right, immediately."

Dr. Salad's words rang in my ears as I drove home. Ringing. "Ringing" made me think of "bells", which made me think of tacos. As I pulled out of the drive-through, I committed to making this my last unhealthy snack until the holidays. Then I remembered -- tomorrow was Thanksgiving!

When I got back to the house, Uncle Cheetoe and my cousins Mariah and Barnabus were sitting on the porch. The nickname "Cheetoe" was a bit of a misnomer. Although he had lost one of his little piggies to a big cat on safari, later inspection of the photographs had revealed the cat in question had been a leopard, not a cheetah. Uncle Cheetoe raised a glass.

"Just in time for the last Cheetoe cider of the year," he said.

"Thanks uncle Cheetoe," I said, "Unfortunately, the doctor says I really shouldn't be having sugar anymore." They deflated.

"But tomorrow's Thanksgiving!" said Cheetoe.

"I'll make an exception on holidays, but I've got to be strict until then."

"You mean you're going to miss your Uncle Cheetoe's last cider of the year because your doctor told you to lay off sugar for..." he looked at his watch and then counted on his fingers. "SEVEN hours?" He pointed at the fast food taco bag as I tried to sneak it behind my back. "SIX hours! You've barely finished swallowing your chalupa!"

When he put it that way, I had to admit I was being kind of unreasonable. He works really hard on his annual batch of fall cider, and it's a big hassle for him to load that big keg into his truck and lug it all the way here.

"Alright," I said, "I'll start the day after tomorrow."

The three of them cheered, and an icy glass of Cheetoe cider appeared in my hand. The taste brought back memories of autumns past; holiday vacations, ruddy foliage. The recipe includes red pepper, lending the cider a distinctive throat hit, similar to ginger beer. I blinked hard.

"You okay?"

"I just had a weird pain in my eyeballs. It went away, though."

"You're fine."

A weight lifted off my shoulders, as I realized I was free again from dietary restriction for more than 24 hours. I had just eaten tacos and had a glass of cider, but the stress of driving home believing I would have to starve myself followed by arguing with my uncle made me feel a little peckish.

The evening passed quickly, as did Thanksgiving morning, and then it was upon us: the greatest indulgence of the year, the climax of ceremonial gluttony. Thanksgiving dinner. My final chance to restore my strength of will before medical necessity forced me to subsist on salad and smoothie until late December. I wanted to make the most of my last meal*.

But my arms felt weirdly tense. My unspecified but nonetheless dire health condition threatened from deep within my veins or nerves or -- I had no idea where. I confess, the doctor speaks exclusively in things I don't want to hear, so I know very little about exactly what is wrong with me, or what will happen if I ignore her orders. I would almost certainly make it though dinner. I’d made it through every previous Thanksgiving. What were the chances this would be the one to do me in? I could recover by late December, navigate my final nutritional hurdle until January when I would supplicate myself to the old gimnasio and fix everything.

Dinner commenced. The turkey was perfectly moist, the mashed potatoes were creamy and smooth; the yams glistened with glaze, and the green beans were so crisp and seasoned that I even convinced myself to eat one of them. The biscuits were buttery, the ham juicy, and the cranberry sauce pleasantly weird in that classic cranberry sauce way. It was an ideal Thanksgiving feast, but the company was perfect too.  Each dish made many laps around the table, and my plate filled and emptied three delectable times. When all was said and done, I felt like a bloated food-filled sack. FYI, my BMI is only 22.

  Dessert consisted of peach cobbler, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, vanilla ice cream, baked twinkies, and several other things. Nana made the cobbler, and she would have felt hurt if I hadn't tried it, so I just had one little slice with some ice cream, and assured her her recipe had made my Thanksgiving complete. The pecan pie was Gran's, and she also required validation for her baking skills, so I just had one little slice of pecan pie and ice cream and made it known that it was spectacular work. Cran Gran (the gran who lives near a cranberry bog, cans homemade cranberry sauce and generally mixes cranberries into anything she can get away with) had baked her famous crapple pie. She wanted to know if I could detect the new ingredient. It took me two slices, but I figured out it was rosemary. Uncle Cheetoe had baked the pumpkin pie, so I had to eat some of that with some ice cream for him. A thumbs up and nod was all he needed to know he had done well. The baked twinkies were my own doing, and I wasn't going to skip tasting one after I had been up all night unwrapping them. The slightly crisp exterior went perfectly with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. With each dish tasted and each contributor validated, each commentator heard, the family breathed a collective sigh of relief. Thanksgiving dinner had been a success.

I could not share in that relief, however. The odd pains and twinges associated with my mysterious food weakness were lighting up all throughout my body. I could feel the pressure all along my spine, at all my joints; I was not sure if I felt it in my stomach, since it ached from overfilling, but I definitely felt it in my head. Despite the non-membership of the word in dictionaries, I could only describe the sensation as "explodey".

"I didn't notice you'd shaved. It looks good." My mother said this. I looked up and noticed she was looking at me.

My hand rose to my face. "I didn't--" I felt no mustache. Only a bare lip, and flaccid filtrum follicles. I looked down. The empty plate in front of me resembled a barbershop floor.

Just then my nose dropped off into my lap.  Before I could shout in surprise, my mouth fell out of my head onto the table. There were explosions at my hips and shoulders, and my four limbs rocketed off of me, propelling me out of my chair and out of the dining room onto the living room floor. There was screaming.

"At least I can still see," I thought to myself. Just then, there was an explosive popping sensation in my orbital cavities. My vision went dark, and my eyeballs splattered against the ceiling. Then the screaming went quiet as my ears went spinning off of my head like ninja stars.

"Just you and me, ass," I said in my mind. But my gluteals swung down like a gate on a hinge, and my white wispy soul drifted up like steam out of the hollow cavity behind.

Now a ghost, I looked down at the pieces of my body scattered about the living room, and thought again about what the doctor had said. Her demonstration with the Mr. Potato Head had been way more literal than I ever imagined. Out of curiosity, I reached a ghostly hand down to touch a slice of crapple pie. I passed right through. My ghost form had a mouth and everything. I tried to taste the pie. Nothing. We just weren’t in the same world anymore.

"Great grandson!"

I looked up to see a ghost welcoming me with open arms.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I am the ghost of your great grandmother! And I can see that you have become a ghost as well! Before your time. That's so sad. BOO hoo. BOO hoo." She brought her hands together and a ghostly pie appeared. "Maybe this will help cheer you up in the aftermath of your recent death. It's my famous ghostberry pie."

"Thanks Great Ghost Gran, but I'm not really in the mood. My life did just end in part from eating pie, after all. All of my plans for my life just went up in smoke."

"You won't even try it?" She started to cry again. "BOO hoo! BOO hoo!"

I rolled my ghost eyes. "Okay, I'll try it." I conjured a ghostly plate and cake server (it's easy to conjure ghost things, it's all just made out of ghost) and helped myself. Leaving the cake server floating there, I conjured a ghost fork and took a dainty bite of the ghost pie. It was delicious! It tasted just like BOO berries. "It's delicious, Great Ghost Gran. What else is there to do around here?"

"Not a lot, I'm afraid. There's haunting, there's spooking, there's conjuring ghost things... yeah, that's about it."

That all sounded very boring, so I ate the rest of the ghost pie. I didn't pace myself in the slightest, since I was already dead. Then I felt a twinge of pain in my ghost eyeballs. "Ghost Gran" I asked, "Is it possible to die as a ghost?"

"Well I suppose SO-o-ohhhh,  great grandson."

"What happens if you die as a ghost?"

"I don't KNOW-oh-ohhhh, perhaps you are reborn."

I knew what I had to do. "Another ghost pie, please."

"Oh! You really loved it! I'm so happy," Ghost Gran cooed delightedly. She conjured another ghost pie. I inhaled it.

"Another." She did it again, and then I did it again.

"Another," I said.

"Oh no, ghost grandson, you're not going to eat yourself to ghost death, are you?"

"I'll be fine, Great Ghost Gran, I just love the pie so much. I can't resist the urge to eat more and more of them. Please keep them coming."

She snapped her next pie into existence, and I slammed it down my ghost-gullet. She conjured the next, and I knocked that one back, too. Conjuring isn't limited by physical movement the way cooking is in the world of the living, so we abruptly reached a pace of 100 pies per second conjured and eaten. I could feel the old familiar pains and twinges coming back. My eyeballs, my hip joints, my spleen. After 7.8 seconds of this breakneck pie-eating pace, my ghost arms rocketed off of my ghost body, and my head exploded, followed by the rest of me.

Ghost Gran's cry of "Ghost grandsooooooooon" was the last thing I heard in that ethereal plane of existence.

The next thing I heard was the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor as my eyes slowly opened. I was in the hospital. Everyone from Thanksgiving dinner was sitting in the room with me. My mother was crying. Uncle Cheetoe stood up and pointed, shouting "He's awake!"

My mother got up and ran to me. "I'm sorry we killed you with food," she sobbed, "we'll never do it again." My father walked over at a much more leisurely pace than my mother. "It was extremely expensive to have your body all stuck back together. Especially the eyeball reassembly. The next time you eat until you literally explode, we're leaving you that way."

I laughed. "You don't have to worry about that. I've learned my lesson."

Then I thought about it.  Had I actually learned anything? The only consequences of the lifelong habits which had led to my early death had been entirely reversible, except for the fact that my dad was angry and had apparently spent a bunch of money.

No, I didn't suppose I had learned anything at all.