Buxom Bird

The discovery plays as procedure and gut-punch at once: bloodstains in the hardware store, a gift box addressed to Ed, and a farmhouse where a heart boils on the stove while Frank Worden finds his mother hanging in the barn.

Ed's arrest is almost anticlimactic — he barely resists, claims faulty memory, and offers a polygraph that finds nothing it can hold. Around him, Adeline curates the press, Bernice is buried, and Frank breaks at Thanksgiving while a turkey becomes, for one terrible second, his mother.