Sour Cream Pie

I should have known something was wrong when his father opened the door grinning like a man possessed and announced.

“I made forty-one sour cream pies!”

Forty-one.
Sour. Cream. Pies.

As if that was a normal human sentence.

He listed them like a deranged auctioneer, sour cream rhubarb, sour cream strawberry, sour cream banana, each flavor worse than the last. I didn’t even know sour cream belonged in pie. I was still trying to process that when I stepped inside.

My stomach soured at the thought, trying to block out the stench that was rising the deeper into the house we went. It smelt of putrid. It smelt of rancid. It smelt of things that should not go inside a human body.

The house looked like a civil war reenactment between carpets and drywall. I’m not sure who won. Carpet rolls slumped against half-demolished walls. Couches were shoved into corners like they’d been fleeing a crime. Every surface wore a thick, gray pelt of dust. It was the kind of place that made you understand tetanus on a spiritual level.

“This way,” my boyfriend said, cheerful, unfazed, a man who had clearly never smelled fresh air. He led me toward the kitchen, which was perched above a short set of stairs. The whole place was a tri-level labyrinth of horror, as if M.C. Escher had taken up hoarding.

I paused halfway down the steps.

Because underneath the pool table, an artifact so dusty it looked upholstered in despair, were baby ducks.

Not in a cute barnyard way.
In a living-room-daycare-for-feral-waterfowl way.

They quacked. They waddled. They reeked.
Little fluffy stink bombs skating across a layer of wood chips and cardboard.

Fine. Whatever. I could still recover. It was Thanksgiving, after all.

Then I stepped into the kitchen.

A small dog was standing on top of the counter, front paws sunk into the turkey carcass, happily eating straight from the roast pan. Cats slithered around the pies, all forty-one of them, licking, pawing, shedding directly into the filling.

And the pies…
Oh, the pies.

They were arranged like a shrine. Pies on the window seals, pies in the sink. Pies stacked on the dejected pool table. Dozens of pale trembling custards, each one fogged with a constellation of cat hair and something that looked disturbingly like sawdust.

 My boyfriend, the man I was hoping would whisper, “We can leave, I’m so sorry, my family is… unwell,” instead brushed aside the counter dog with the ease of a practiced professional and started making himself a plate.

A heaping one.

Turkey, dust, fur, and despair.

I must have looked horrified, because he paused only to say, with utter sincerity:

“What? It’s good here.”

And that’s when I realized:

The pies weren’t the red flag.
The ducks weren’t the red flag.
The cat-hair custard wasn’t the red flag.

He was the red flag.
And forty-one sour cream pies were my omen to run.