A Tortured Thanksgiving

The cemetery behind Plymouth’s old First Church smelled of salt wind and wet leaves. Charlie—eight years old, knees scabbed, pockets full of acorns—had slipped away from the school field trip.

The other kids were inside the replica village learning how to churn butter. Charlie preferred the quiet company of headstones.

He found the grave by tripping over it. The stone was thin, half-sunk, the lettering worn to whispers:

HERE LYES YE BODY OF

EZRA BLACKWOOD

DIED NOV. 23, 1621

AGED 29 YRS

Charlie crouched, tracing the numbers with a finger. “You didn’t even get one Thanksgiving,” he said aloud. “That’s not fair.”

He plucked a turkey feather from his craft-project hat—construction paper, stapled, already drooping—and laid it on the grave like an offering. “I wish you could come back and taste the real thing. Just once.”

The wind died. The feather stood straight up, quivering. A crack zigzagged through the earth, not loud, more like ice giving way on a pond. Dirt puffed outward.

A skeletal hand, still wearing shreds of a black buckle cuff, pushed through the soil and seized Charlie’s sneaker.

Charlie did not scream. He was too astonished. The rest of Ezra Blackwood followed—bones the color of weak tea, a few hanks of hair like straw, eye sockets glowing faint green as marsh fire. The pilgrim’s jaw hung loose; when it shut, the click echoed like a musket.

“Boy,” Ezra rasped, voice dry as parchment, “what year?”

“Um. 2025.”

Ezra stood. His skeleton spine popped into line. The buckle on his remaining shoe glinted and his pilgrim hat slanted. “Four centuries have gone by,” he said, wonder and dread braided together. “Are they still arguing over cranberries?”

Charlie grinned. “We have canned ones now. And football.” Ezra tilted his skull.

“Foot… ball?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

They left the graveyard through a gap in the stone wall. Ezra moved with the stiff grace of something relearning gravity. Each step rattled. He kept to shadows—behind tour buses, under the awning of the closed wax museum—because daylight on bare bones felt like judgment.

At the harbor, Charlie bought a hot dog from a cart. Ezra stared at the neon mustard, the steamed bun, the casual way the vendor swiped a card. He lifted the dog with both hands, reverent, and bit. The casing snapped. Juice ran down his ribs.

“Mercy,” he whispered. “Better than porridge.”

Charlie laughed so hard he hiccupped. Ezra tried to laugh too; it came out a hollow clatter.

Night fell early, the way it does in November. Charlie’s mother texted: Where are you? Turkey’s almost ready. Charlie pocketed the phone and led Ezra through backyards strung with orange lights. They crouched behind the inflatable turkey on the Millers’ lawn and watched families through windows—tables groaning, uncles arguing politics, cousins sneaking pie.

Ezra’s glow dimmed. “They are… loud,” he said. “Louder than the Wampanoag drums. Yet they still display the same hunger. But we were tortured with the fear that winter wouldn’t end. I don't sense that with you today.”

Charlie offered him a stolen dinner roll. Ezra crumbled it, letting the pieces fall through his ribs like sand. “I was buried with my newest hat and cape,” he said. “But now it looks so tattered and worn.” Charlie didn’t know what to say to that. He felt bad for Ezra.

Later, on the dark soccer field, Ezra stood beneath the goalpost and looked up. The sky was a bowl of crushed velvet pierced by airplane lights.

“I feel the pull,” he said. “Like a tide under the ribs I no longer have. The spirit realm tugs. It promises silence. No more wondering what became of my wife, my daughter—both lost to the cold temperatures that winter.”

Charlie kicked at the frost. “You could stay here with me, Ezra. Hide in my tree fort. I’d bring you leftovers.”

Ezra knelt, bones creaking. “And every year you’d grow taller, and I’d remain this rattletrap monument to a wish. You’d forget to visit. I’d watch you forget.” He placed a fingerbone on Charlie’s chest, right over the heart. “Some feasts are meant for the living.”

A wind rose, smelling of woodsmoke and distant oceans. Leaves swirled into a funnel around them. Ezra’s outline blurred; the green in his eyes flared, then banked like coals under ash.

“Tell them,” he said, voice thinning, “tell them the first Thanksgiving had no pie. Tell them we were terrified and grateful in equal measure, yet tortured by the cold. Tell them—” The wind took the rest.

Charlie stood alone. The turkey feather lay on the goal line, ordinary again. He picked it up and tucked it into his pocket with the acorns.

At home, the table was chaos—cousins fighting over drumsticks, his father carving with theatrical flair. Charlie slid into his seat. When his mother passed the cranberries, he took an extra spoonful.

Later, clearing plates, he found a single bone-white fragment in the gravy boat. He slipped it into the trash before anyone noticed, but he kept the feather.

Years afterward, whenever Charlie smelled November woodsmoke, he felt the faint click of a jawbone shutting, tasting relish for the first time. And somewhere under Plymouth soil, Ezra Blackwood slept without dreaming, certain that one boy, at least, remembered the price of a second helping.

THE END.

May You Have a Happy Thanksgiving,