Viggo, the Vegetarian Vulture

I had single-handedly set our family back decades.

Original short fiction by Eric Vajentic

I bowed my featherless head in shame. 

Uncle Vito glared at me, fuming, an unlit cigarette hanging out of the right side of his twisted beak.  

"Do you know how many years it took us to get the state contract for this section of I-35," my uncle bellowed.

I looked over toward my mom and dad, hoping to find some support, but all I saw was my mother crying and my father shaking his head.

"A vegetarian," screamed uncle Vito.  "Who ever heard of a vegetarian vulture?  Christ, Viggo, why couldn't you have gotten a tattoo or something?  No, you had to go and bring complete shame upon the family.  You're a fucking disgrace."  

What could I say?  He was right. 

My family had been the exclusive contractor for carrion removal along the stretch of I-35 between Des Moines and Kansas City for about 10 years.  When word got out that there was a vegetarian in the family, we would surely be re-assigned back to the gravel roads and garbage dumps from where we came. 

I had single-handedly set our family back decades. But, what could I do?  It was no longer in my power to deny myself.

Months of conversion therapy failed.

I watched my family suffer in shame and it all became too much for me to bear. I decided to run off with a flock of Canadian geese. I was ugly, ungainly and alone.  They were beautiful, graceful and a family.  In short, I didn't fit in, but at least I could be myself. 

The geese were kind to me, and I began to thrive on a diet of corn, lettuce, grain and grapes.  I don't remember how long it was that I was happy, but eventually, fate came calling.

One day, several miles outside of Bethany, MO, three of my brother geese were killed in a tragic windmill accident.  As we gathered around what was left of their bloodied and battered bodies, overhead began to circle a flock of vultures. 

My family, I saw with a mixture of nostalgia and horror.  I couldn't bear the shame of what was about to happen.  I flew away, alone and confused.  I was completely isolated, a single vegetarian vulture in a world where it seemed that everything feasted upon dead things.  

I started making my way southwest, in hopes of reaching the Grand Canyon, which I had heard had become an oasis for birds with alternative lifestyles.  Birds of a different feather, you might say.  (Hey, I never said I was a comedian!) A life of petty crime sustained me, dive bombing cultivated gardens and hoisting Wonder bread out of the dumpsters behind supermarkets. 

I made it as far as Winslow, Arizona, where I alighted next to a man with a guitar standing on a corner with a dreamy look in his eyes. Not much happening here, I thought to myself, so I hopped into a back alley, where I ran into a hound dog with a defective nose and an OCD pig that hated to get muddy. 

It didn't take us long to bond in our community of brokenness.  We walked back out to the corner, and asked the guitar guy if he could play the blues.  He smiled, and started to play bwah bwah bwah in A minor or some such groove. I winked at a passing flatbed, lifted an imaginary glass and said — or rather, crooned —

I've just got to say,
’I’ve got the vegetarian,
the vegetarian vulture blues.’