Free The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch

Stromberg boy, who was snitching drinks from the glass of that foul liquor (one taste had been enough for Alice) sitting before Lady’s empty plate. If only Lady or Blossom would stop serving food and sit down for a minute, she could escape from the intolerable hypochondriac. “Tell me,” she said, “when did it all start?”

    The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The moment everyone had been waiting for—the dreadful moment of the main course—could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.
    Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire and came to the table still sizzling.
    There is some pork in them
, Alice reassured herself.
I probably won’t be able to tell the difference
.
    Everyone’s attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.
    There, but for the grace of God….
Alice thought.
    Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn’t feel an excess of it just then.
    “What’s everyone waiting for?” Anderson demanded. “There’s food on the table.”
    Alice’s attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice’s look—and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at
her?
    Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. “Mrs. Anderson,” he announced, “you are a
marvelous
cook. How do you do it? I haven’t had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when.”
    Alice felt Blossom’s fingers relax and pull out of hers.
She’s feeling better, now that the worst is over
, Alice thought.
    But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted.

    He, Buddy, would not have allowed it, much less have originated and insisted upon it, but then very probably he, Buddy, would not have been able to bring the village through those seven hellish years. Primitive, pagan, unprecedented as it was, there was a rationale for it.
    It. They were all afraid to call it by its right name. Even Buddy, in the inviolable privacy of his own counsel, shied away from the word for it.
    Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent (the Donner party, the wreck of the
Medusa
), and Buddy would have had to go no further than this for an excuse—if they had been starving.
    Beyond necessity, explanations grew elaborate and rather metaphysical. Thus, metaphysically, in this meal the community was united by a complex bond, the chief of whose elements was complicity in murder, but this complicity was achieved by a ritual as solemn and mysterious as the kiss by which Judas betrayed Christ; it was a sacrament. Mere horror was subsumed into tragedy, and the town’s Thanksgiving dinner was the crime and the atonement, so to speak, in one blow.
    Thus the theory, but Buddy, in his heart, felt nothing but the horror of it, mere horror, and nothing in his stomach but nausea.
    He washed down another steadfast mouthful with the licorice-flavored alcohol.

    Neil, when he had polished off his second sausage, began to tell a dirty joke. They had all, except for Orville and Alice, heard him tell the same joke last Thanksgiving. Orville was the only one to laugh, which made it worse rather than better.
    “Where the hell is the deer?” Neil shouted, as though this followed naturally from the punch line.
    “What