Ancestor Series: Mother Bonnie
Born in 1895, Mother Bonnie was always one for puddin’. Tapioca puddin’, banana puddin’, figgy puddin’ — it made no difference to Mother Bonnie. She just really liked that thickly smooth texture, like a dessert dish full of curdled mucous, topped with a sheath of viscous skin. As a child, she’d slurp it up real good, then gargle with it to get rid of the tobacco aftertaste she was born with.
Now, Mother Bonnie grewed up to be a legend in her neighborhood. Having thirteen chitlins herself, Mother Bonnie knew a thang or two about getting the little snot-nosed ones to eat all the important foods, like beets and sweetbread. She’d grind ’em up real good in her sausage machine and stir the ensuing mush into a base of vanilla bean puddin’, letting it set into a coagulated mound of sweet nutrition.
All the mamas in the neighborhood came to Mother Bonnie’s farmhouse for help getting their own children to eat their vegetables and other pickled delicacies. They’d trade heirloom pearls, romance novels, masturbatory apparati fashioned from corn husks. One desperate mama used to let Mother Bonnie suckle from her wrist.
During the Depression, our Mother Bonnie had to get creative, as all the livestock done began shrivelin’ up like pruned carcasses.
She began digging up fresh graves for puddin’ mix-ins. As more and more holes began to turn up the cemetery, Mother Bonnie’s children grew plumper, their cheeks outflushed all their schoolmates by at least fifteen shades. It didn’t take long for other townspeople to notice the correlation, and soon no one ventured near Mother Bonnie’s farmhouse, lest they wind up puddified.
Not that Mother Bonnie minded being outcast.
It gave her more quality time in her puddin’ studio. And even after all of her children grewed up and moved away, Mother Bonnie continued to churn away at the puddin’. Even in failing health, body half-necrotic and gangrened from untreated infections, Mother Bonnie swore by packing her sores with puddin’.
Her motto was: If it ain’t able to be fixed with puddin’, then fuck it up the ass and go back to bed.
No one in her family uses it.
Mother Bonnie was straight in the middle of ladling bowls of bloody puddin’ to a table set for no one when she finally succumbed to the order of things and gave up her gelatinous ghost. It was Flag Day. She was 99 years old.
Her puddin’ is served in school cafeterias nationwide.
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