Happy Family
by
Nicholas Ilton

My mother always used to complain about how I never noticed anything beautiful. How I didn’t notice sunsets, or the way the moon reflected on the ocean at night. How I never noticed a beautiful flower, or payed any attention to art. Well mother, if you could see how shiny I made your son of a bitch husband’s skull right now, I think you’d be proud. Trouble is, your shiny skull’s right there next to it.
I had been up all night with the Dremel and an electric toothbrush polishing the two skulls after giving them both a good boil in some salted water. The coarseness of the salt was a very handy tip I discovered to help remove the more stubborn sinew and muscle during the boiling process. The Dremel was used to delicately sand the more difficult to reach nooks and crannies a human skull seems to be rife with. It’s a 7.2 volt cordless with a Ni-Cad battery, which allowed me to work free of the entanglements often associated with working with power, the cord getting in the way all the time, and on occasion even knocking my other work off the bench. The toothbrush applied some bi-carbonate soda for the final clean. Not quite like the polishing of silverware that mother used to do ad nausea, but similar enough for it to remind me of the smell of silver polish when I would come home from school. We won’t be using either of these skulls as a gravy boat though, I assure you. I agonised for hours about what to do with the rest of the body parts I had lying around the place in varying degrees of dismemberment. The boiling down of the bones to remove all the meat and fat and muscle and sinew, whilst being fantastically effective, produced a stench the likes of which I hope never to smell again. I was also not keen on the rigours of chopping the rest of the corpses up into a size suitable for the big soup pot my mother bought me when I first moved out of home. I had since become quite proficient at a wonderful seasonal minestrone, and all credit to mother, she had given me her family recipe for pea and ham soup, and this pot had made its fair share of that dish over the years. But it is now an entirely different apparatus, and I would say it has boiled its last soup. While ruminating over the best course of action for the rest of the body parts, I violently hacked off their feet and hands with a reciprocating saw I purchased from last summer when we were extending the rear of the house. We installed some French doors and a new deck to take full advantage of the afternoon sun in our north facing backyard. I didn’t think I would ever use the saw again, but was now quite pleased I had found another use for it. I had fucked my wife’s’ good chef’s knife removing my parent’s heads before I boiled them down, and when she gets back from her sister’s house in an hour or so I was sure she was going to shit herself. I put the hands on to the boil and wrapped the feet in the employment section of last Saturday’s paper. Dad was always on at me to get a job when I was younger. I enjoyed this last bit of irony on my part. It would’ve been nice to share to it with him. I had up to this point been working on the kitchen floor, but decided to heave my headless and handless and footless parents one at a time onto the island bench in the middle of the kitchen. Despite how uncomfortable it made me feel, it was pretty clear to me that I needed at the very least to preserve">make mum and dad a bit more manageable. I began with mum, from the ankles up, hacking away at each joint with the reciprocating saw. My wife was right. We should have done this before the renovations. I assumed that as the heart had stopped pumping the blood that it wouldn’t go everywhere, and that perhaps there wouldn’t be as much of it. But I was wrong on both counts, and by the time mum was just a torso, the antique Spanish white walls and the lavender mist feature wall were both red. I placed the limbs into one garbage bag and her torso into another and put them on the back deck. I then hauled the old man up onto the bench and began the same routine on him. The saw was a bit blunt now and it felt like he drank a lot more milk than mum. It was hell getting through his bones. Dad took up three garbage bags to mum’s two. After I bagged him up I took him out to the deck and found the dog had gotten into mum and she was everywhere. Her thigh was in the veggie patch, a forearm in the roses. Just like mum, she’s got to be everywhere at once. I retrieved most of mum and put her in a new garbage bag, then put the bags in the shed away from the dog. I left a shin bone in the dog’s jaws because she nearly tore my hand off when I tried to get it off her. I went back inside and found my wife standing there with a KFC bucket in one hand and her ruined chef’s knife in the other, a look of disappointment in her eyes. I wiped down the island bench with a few tea towels and threw a table cloth over it, and we sat and ate the chicken in silence. I could tell my wife wasn’t too pleased with the mess I’d made. While I may have done a good job with the killing of my parents, I couldn’t have made a bigger mess with their disposal. After the chicken, my wife wiped her mouth on the table cloth, snapped on a pair of dishwashing gloves and started to scrub. I took this as my cue to finish up with mum and dad. The dog had nearly eaten all the flesh off the bone and was looking for a place to inter it somewhere in the garden. I could tell she knew there were more bones and she was wanting to quickly move onto the next fleshy piece, and then I think the next and then the one after that. I went back inside and the wife was calmly working her way down from the ceiling, she had scrubbed the walls to around bench height so far, and had sprayed an odour cover up around which barely disguised the smell of the hands on the stove top. I washed my hands in the kitchen sink and went to the study and turned the computer on. I logged on to and searched for freezers. I placed a couple of bids on two freezers that were ending soon, then went back to the kitchen to help my wife clean. After what seemed like an age we were on our hands and knees scrubbing the last of the blood from the grout in the tiles. This proved harder than expected, but with elbow grease and sweat we were able to remove most of it. I went to the garage and fetched a drop sheet and the remaining antique Spanish white and lavender mist, a roller and a step ladder, and came back inside to find my wife draining the pot with the hands in it and shaking her head at me. My wife had a lot more experience in these matters than me, having done away with her parents before I met her, as well as a previous lover. For my part, I just wanted to show her I could do it. My wife was in the back yard playing fetch with the dog and mum’s shin bone. It was great to see mum finally being a part of the family. I was pleased that my last memory of my mother would be a happy one. I draped the drop sheet over the island bench and the floor in the kitchen and started painting. I estimated that it would take at least two coats, even on the roof. The lavender mist had great coverage, and the feature wall was good as new after just one coat, but to be safe I gave it two. The kitchen looked good as new after I was done, save for a few red spots in the grout on the floor. I opened up all the windows and even burnt a couple of sticks of incense to help make the place smell pretty again. I checked and was out bid on both the freezers, so I placed a bid on a third freezer, before heading outside to play fetch with my wife and dog and mum. We played for what seemed like hours and dusk was upon us before we knew it. I threw the dog another bone, a forearm I think, and the wife and I headed inside where I planned to make some gazpacho, until I remembered where the recipe was. We had toasted sandwiches in our good as new kitchen, and drank cheap wine around the island bench, and talked and laughed like we’d just met. They say around the kitchen table is where the best family memories are made. I couldn’t agree more.