Excerpt from "Where It Hurts"


You know this game, right?
It's played at dinner parties?
After a few glasses of wine?
When we've left the kitchen and the dining room and we're all sitting in the living room and there's been three-in-a-row of those awkward conversation lulls, when saying anything seems too loud so we're all busy saying nothing at all, looking interested in the carpet?
The game where you try to figure out the lie in three guesses or less?
Like this.
I say: In my life I have eaten bear, shark, raw sea-urchin egg, ox-heart, seal, and caribou.
If you guess which one I haven't eaten, if you catch my lie, it's your turn to fabricate a story. To tell an untruth.
Mostly people guess bear. Especially if I'm in a city. Bear! You can't have eaten bear!
That's wrong. I've eaten bear. Quite a lot of bear, actually. Shanks of black bears pulled from the backs of 4x4 pickups, hunks of skinless slopping red flesh chucked onto stomped-down cardboard boxes thrown flat to keep the blood off the paint of the truck bed. Being hauled to the dump by trophy hunters. Meat rescued by my dad. Hundreds of pounds of meat thumped onto the kitchen counter and hacked into manageable wet slabs, chasing off the cats mewling at the fatty scent, wrapping it in newsprint, turfing it into the freezer. Turned into stew. Then fed to the dogs when it became too frostbitten for even our hungry mouths, a strange grey ice-mold that sometimes the dogs would pause over, sniff at before swallowing back in loud gulps.
If no one can guess what I haven't eaten, I get to lie again.
I could say: I have travelled to Seoul, Paris, Sofia, Istanbul, Tokyo, Delhi, and Chicago. One is a lie. It's everyone's job to figure out which place I've never set foot in.
I like the game. I like all the strange truths people keep hidden inside them. How easily a lie can be buried in such plain sight.