He recalled, against his better judgment, a woman he knew whose father forced her to eat blood pudding and headcheese for breakfast, a placental mush stirred bloodied with a fork, wingtips of blood and gruel discolouring her face, a clownish smile gone terribly wrong. Some people are fated with Thomas’ liver, sopped with Port and Paddy’s cure-all, a phonetic mess of dilettantism and Welsh bolshie’s, a portrait of the drunkard as a young dog: her liver the size of a soccer ball, bloated and septic with corpsegas, briny with carrion and lye. She drinks to assuage the tremors, the scourge of Saint John’s Wart: hogshead tripe with blood pudding, an earwig salad, a light vinaigrette on the side plate, not for the faint of stomach or kidney, renal failure and so-and-so. Her children sat in the squalor of her thoughts, reading takeout menus and other people’s mail. Linking sausage to sausage, Eaton’s sells blood pudding casing, twenty-five to the dollar, skillet-fried with bacon rind and allspice, a peppering of confectionary sugar to stave off the spoiling aftertaste in the scrotum of her throat, a banshee screeching in the pendulum of her sternum.
