My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

Seven of us sat at her long banquet table, awaiting the food.  A little dog took a nap on a yellow silk pillow at the end of the couch behind us.  Thing looked like a moustache with a ribbon in it.  The ribbon matched the pillow.  The dog snored and wheezed at the same time.

She entered the room like a breech birth, backing in ass first to knock the door open before turning with a platter full of steaming carcass like a baked cross between a bloated tick and chicken.

“That’s not a turkey,” I said.

“It’s a duck duck goose,” she said, “A homemade Turducken.  We halved the ducks, and sewed them onto the sides of the goose body with corn husk.”  The steam from the bodies made her face sweat as she held the platter chest level.  “Which means even the stitching’s edible.”

The thing looked like a demented science project somebody’d hoped to baste, bake and serve to dispose of the evidence.  You could see where the various bodies were sewn together, the sutures thick and irregular as homemade carpet staples.  Where the talus slope of stuffing crumbled into the pool of grease on the platter, a petroleum rainbow floated on the surface when the light caught it right.

The sides were even more frightening.  She’d made Native American salsa, a ruddy paste made from yams and radishes, spiked with quarter chunks of red onion.  You were supposed to spread it on shingles of bark with a specialized spoon-knife she’d whittled especially for the purpose. She’d say, “pass the knoon,” and only her kids would laugh.