A Bolian Thanksgiving (Part 2 of 3)

Posted on 02 Dec 2013 @ 4:24pm by Lieutenant Olsam Mott

1,167 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: Indiana, Earth
Timeline: MD 07 - 1420 hrs

[ON]

Olsam eyed the patient in front of him. It was hanging upside down, motionless, stunned by some prod-like device Farmer Jansen had wielded. Turning to his open medkit, he loaded a hypospray and injected it into the patient's exposed, mostly featherless neck. Jansen grunted.

"What the hell was that? I thought I told you none of that neuro-...whatever."

"It was damurin. An anticoagulant," Olsam said, his eyes narrowed in focus. Hypospray in hand, opened medkit nearby, shrouded in an air of confidence and expertise, he suddenly seemed every bit the doctor. "I thought you said we need to exsanguinate it?"

"Well, yeah, it's best t'do that before preparin' it," Jansen admitted, nodding as he looked from the medkit to the doctor to the turkey. He ain't never exsanguinated nothing with all this kind of equipment before.

"Okay then," Olsam said definitively, settling the matter. After replacing the hypospray, he turned back to the patient to study it. He was accustomed to saving lives rather than taking them, but the knowledge was sadly interchangeable. He would kill this turkey, and he would kill it with remarkable efficiency. His hand extended to the side, palm up and open. "Laser scalpel."

Jansen cleared his throat, surprised and a little put off by being relegated to surgical assistant on his own property by some bossy blueman Fed. "Now see here, first off I don't know what a laser scalpel looks like enough t'hand you one. And more important, you oughta just take that axe I give you and chop it's damn head off like I said. It's quick and easy."

The Bolian wrinkled his nose and twisted his face up in disgust, as if that were the worst idea he'd ever heard. "Maybe quick, maybe easy, but not very efficient." He grabbed the laser scalpel, turned back to the patient, and activated the scalpel to make a precise incision in one fluid movement. "First, sever the jugular vein, wait for blood pressure to drop from blood loss, and then sever the carotid artery. The waiting is important; it helps reduce blood spatter."

The second incision came moments later with the same exacting precision. The rate of blood flow increased, easing down over the turkey's dangling head and dropping into the bucket below. After a few moments the flow slowed, eventually coming to a trickle before stopping altogether. The cramped room inside the barn took on the smell of blood, which seemed to bother neither of them.

Olsam opened his medical tricorder and moved the sensor wand up and down the body twice. "Time of death, 1425 hours. Cause of death determined to be incisions in the jugular vein and carotid artery leading to exsanguination." He closed the tricorder solemnly and turned to the farmer. "He's dead, Jansen."

"Well I'll be damned. So he is. You got any other kinda fancy shit you wanna do to it, or you gonna let me show you how to prep this thing now?"

Olsam suddenly looked sheepish now that his role as physician had concluded. Avoiding Jansen's impatient gaze, he asked, "What's the next step?"

"We gotta stick it in that there pot o' hot water over yonder for about 15 seconds, that'll loosen up the feathers so as we can scrape 'em off with that ther-"

"Can't we just-"

"You Fed boys is always tryin' to rush stuff," Jansen snapped, cutting him off before he could go any further. He grabbed the bird by its feet, yanked it off the hanging chain and took it over to the pot of water. "You wanna do it fast, or you wanna do it right?"

Olsam paused for a moment before replying, more question than answer, "Right?"

"Right," Jansen confirmed, dunking the bird for the allotted amount of time, unceremoniously slapping it down on a nearby table and using some sort of tool to quickly defeather the bird. Its skin was dimpled and clammy in appearance, reminding Olsam of an autopsy he'd once performed on a Skorr. Before he could share his memory of the occasion, Jansen presented him with a knife. "All right, now we gotta remove the stomach, the esophagus and the head. Think you can handle it?"

Olsam nodded, as if it was a foregone conclusion. He recalled almost instantly the information his tricorder had fed him about the turkey's anatomy before making a cut at the neck and identifying the esophagus. A secondary cut down the neck exposed the thoracic cavity, allowing him to reach into the abdomen and detach the stomach from the lining and remove it. A final cut severed the head/esophagus/stomach combination from the neck, which went into something Jansen kept referring to as a "slop bucket."

"Bet you never figured all that fancy Starfleet anatomical trainin' would be put to use butcherin', huh?" Jansen grinned.

Olsam merely shrugged. He guessed it was true but found it curious that Jansen felt the need to point it out. He'd still not wrapped his head around the Terran habit of making such large differentiations between levels of education, career and class. Were they not all citizens of the Federation? That was enough for the Bolian; he could care less whether someone knew how to cut the head off a turkey and remove its stomach because they were a doctor or someone who had been doing it as a matter of trade-craft for decades.

"This next part's a little delicate, so I'm gonna do it for you," he said, motioning for the knife. "One wrong move and it's gonna ruin ever'thing. We gotta remove the oil sac back 'ere, cut out the anus, extract the colon and other innards and then clean up the heart and the gizzard so as you can use 'em in your stuffin', y'see?"

"Yes, of course," Olsam lied, leaning over Jansen's shoulder to observe.

Of course he saw. He had eyes, didn't he?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Jansen waved to Olsam as the hovercar pulled away from the farmhouse back toward the highway. The turkey had been finely butchered, safely stored in a small stasis container, and placed in the trunk to await its final demise in the oven of the Davis household the next day.

Before departing, Jansen shook Olsam's hand less out of formality and more as something closer to genuine affection. The blue Fed was mighty annoying, that was for damn sure, but something about his wide-eyed naivete and enthusiasm was infectious. By the time they'd pulled the bird apart and prepared it, he'd even managed to laugh at a few of the Bolian's jokes. Or he assumed they were jokes. Throughout the conversation he'd had a hard time telling.

"Weirdest damn customer I ever had," Jansen said, shaking his head as he watched the hovercar turn onto the highway and rapidly accelerate toward the horizon. He turned and reached for the screen door, still in disbelief. "By far."

[TBC]

Lieutenant (JG) Olsam Mott, M.D.
Starfleet Medical Corps
VM-899-6519

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