Getting a Turkey

Trifecta gave us a challenge this week.  Turkey - as in 3 successive strikes in bowling kind of turkey.  So, here's my attempt that came in at exactly 333 words.  Have fun and be sure to check out other takes on this prompt.  It should be fun!

“Guilty.”

The metallic ring of the judge’s gavel still haunts my dreams.  I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around it.  I’d gotten the turkey.  Not that bird that people used to eat a long time ago.  Three strikes kind of turkey.  You used to get a turkey in bowling.  That’s what my grandparents said.  We don’t get to play games like that anymore.  Now turkey is more like the baseball rule – three strikes and you’re out. 

It means you’re sent to live outside the walls.  There’s no shelter, no food provided, no medical care and, most importantly, no walls or weapons for safety.  Ya see, everything here has evolved way too fast.  Scientists say it took only one hundred years to get to this point when it should have been thousands, if not millions.

What point is that?  Just about everything on this planet has evolved to prey on us humans.  We used to be at the top of the food chain, but that ain't so no more.  We outrank very little life on this planet now.  That’s why the walls and weapons are so important.  Everything has poison, teeth, claws, thorns or something else that is designed to kill us and eat us.  Not always in that order.

People getting sent outside the walls have romantic notions that once enough of us are out there, we will create this big uprising and the system will change and life will go on happily ever after.  I hate to break it to ya, but that ain't happening either.  Most people who get the turkey, unlike a bowling turkey, don’t win.  They don’t survive long beyond the walls.  Those that do are too preoccupied with surviving to think about fighting back.

That judge’s gavel fell for me about four months ago.  It’s hard to keep track of the days out here.  They all blur together into one long hunt for food while trying to avoid becoming food.  It gets old real fast.