How to Make Soup
by Laura Perkins
Snapping turtle eggs split like old fruit when thrown hard enough. We rolled them in our fingers, greenish-white and perfectly round. They were the size of marbles and still warm from the body. Sometimes we squeezed too hard, and the elastic shell burst. Ectoplasmic goo trailed down our knuckles.
They mostly soft-bounced off our bodies like water balloons to land on the dirt road around our house, the place where we played. They popped underneath our untied sneakers. We trailed half-mud prints, my brother Mike and me. The dirt here was mostly glass dust and sharp rocks. The skin from our palms and knees was gone, the raw underneath glittering wet and dirty. Blood dotted Mike’s jeans, my old jeans, stains blooming at the faded joint of the denim. Later Mom would make us strip in the bathtub and would tip a dark brown jug of peroxide to bubble and make us howl, but not yet.
Everything you have to be afraid of can be found under your feet, Ronnie told us. When he first moved in, months back, he won us over by showing us his sockless foot. Snapper got me there, he said unnecessarily, angling his foot so we could see the chewed nub of it. White scars and an abrupt end where his two small toes should be. The edge a zippered ridge.
Sometimes I can feel them still, Ronnie said. He wiggled what he could, and we watched the bones flex under his skin. Mike reached out to touch and then drew back, leaning away. Who knew if it was true, what he said. Sometimes Ronnie drank, and he propped the foot up on a pillow so we could all see. It itches, he said and mimed scratching the air, then fell back with a sigh. Mom always hurried us into our rooms when they got to that point of drinking. We huddled in our beds and listened to the music play on the other side of the wall, the raised voices and the other sometime-sounds. Mike slept curled up like a dog so no part of his body hung over the bed.
After their wild nights, sometimes Ronnie disappeared for days, and Mom said good riddance and fell around the house weeping. She shooed us out of the house until nightfall so she could talk on the phone with our aunt, cradling some new hurt or another, saying, It’s not that bad, really, don’t be dramatic. When Ronnie returned, he always came with a gift, dropping some thing he killed, a rabbit or pheasant, on our doorstep. Never met someone who gifts things like a cat, Mom said, but always as she reached out to stroke Ronnie’s stubbled cheek, one rare soft touch we hardly ever saw.
Today it was the turtle and it was alive, heavy club feet churning the air when he lifted it by the rim of its shell. Watch, he said, and held heavy pliers in front of its sharp-tipped jaws. It clamped on the end with a speed that startled us. Ronnie stretched out the head and then cut it at the neck, one swift blow. Dark plummy blood leaked onto the plywood board Ronnie used as a surface. Here. He handed me the pliers. The jaws were still clamped tight. Careful, Ronnie said, those things’ll still bite, they never stop, not even killing stops them. The jaws moved, flexing opened and closed. Mike and I took turns throwing it at each other. He found loose French fries from the trash and fed it until the jaws stopped, a toy that lost its charge. By then Ronnie had peeled away the shell and found the eggs.
We’ve gone searching with him before in the cattail-choked pond near our house. Step high, Ronnie told us, don’t dangle off the edge of anything. We stepped high in the sucking, murky water, pulse knocking, wondering what was under our feet. Did it hurt? Mike asked, and sometimes Ronnie said that it hurt more than anything, and sometimes he said he didn’t feel a thing, just the pressure and the loss.
Once the eggs were spent, we went back to Ronnie and the blood-soaked board. Later he would give the meat to Mom so she could boil it to rubber. We would have soup for days. The shell he scooped out and tossed into the yard for the dog to chew, but he saved something.
Here, he said. He slipped something warm and twitching into my palm. The heart, slick and small and still beating.
When will it stop? I asked and Ronnie shrugged. Mike and I huddled close, watching, waiting for the end.
About the Author:
Laura Perkins is a writer living in Cheyenne, WY. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The Southeast Review, Bodega, failbetter, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.
