I cleaned up, climbed the stairs... and found the bedroom empty. There was the strangest commotion drifting down the hall from Sue’s office. Gingerly I tested the doorknob; the door was locked.

As I’ve said, I trusted Sue implicitly; but try as I might, I couldn’t make this situation add up. Sue sometimes locked the door when she didn’t want to be disturbed. But this was after midnight, and I wasn’t supposed to be home quite yet. After my brief conversation with the general they’d all but shooed me out the door of the banquet hall so that my boss could tell some kind of scandalous story, which I gathered involved a pair of married, supposedly straight, senior officers getting caught in a compromising position in a secure area. “Sorry, Cal, we gotta hear this and it’s above your pay grade...”

At any rate, here I was, and there she was, making a fair bit of noise. Again I mustered my stealth, which was challenging; my BAC at that point was well under the legal limit, but definitely not zero, and I was feeling a tumult of confused emotions. I knelt and pressed my ear to the door, careful not to let it bang against its latch.

I could hear feral moans and strained speech that were clearly Sue’s, and another voice as well, although I couldn’t credit who it sounded like. Something debauched was going down, but what?

Occam’s Razor would put forth first that Sue was with another man, second that she was loudly masturbating to porn; beyond that, no other explanations came to mind that held up. It was surreal, not knowing for sure which was the truth, but I decided that in either case I would do the same thing.

I crept to the garage, and from a utility drawer I pulled out the copy I’d surreptitiously made of Sue’s office key. I couldn’t tell you why I had done it, I suppose I just had an overactive imagination. What if Sue locked herself into “the woodshed” to work one day, and then had a medical emergency? At any rate, I’d done it, and now I was sufficiently weirded out that I would take the risk of potentially having a fight about privacy later. If she was cheating, that’d be bad of course, and I would blame myself for letting my job come between us. But my mind, ever optimistic, was fixating on the other possibility. Just a couple times in our relationship, I’d accidentally walked in on Susan masturbating furtively like this, where she thought she wouldn’t be found out; and both times, it had resulted in her opening up about a new kink, and the two of us schtupping with such zeal and ecstasy that even angels would blush.

Carefully I inserted and turned the key, hoping the sounds from within would cover me. The lock quietly clicked, the handle turned, and the door swung open...

I stood speechless for a good 30 seconds, watching them go at it. You could say, in a sense, that Sue was cheating, but it just didn’t tell the story.

“Sue, what the hell is going on? I’d ask if you were getting freaky with The Roast, but I won’t give up my grip on reality that eas... Sue? Sue?”

“I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to start over.”

“Sue, what the hell is—”

My beloved wife stopped abruptly and tried to stand, knocking her head right into the metal shade of her stand lamp.

“Ouch!”

She staggered backwards and stood up more slowly, rubbing the back of her skull, and looked at me with confusion. Fuck, how could I ever stay mad at that punim. Even if she had managed to louse up both my experiment and my prize bird. Even if my privacy was... okay, let’s not be hypocritical. We both played our parts in getting to this moment.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. The reality was crazy enough without me bringing my neurotic obsession with holiday roasts into it.

“I said, that of all the ways you might have tried to snoop on my work, I never imagined this. Bravissimo, cara mia.”

Sue looked at me through swollen pupils. “Calvin,” she said, voice and face awash in regret that was extremely dissonant with the obvious tells of sexual arousal. “I’m not sorry I spied, but I am terribly sorry that I wrecked your bird. I took the wrong edible, and—”

I waved her off.

“Save it, I’m not mad about the bird. I mean, I am upset about the bird, but. Let’s come back to that. We have much bigger things to discuss. Number one, whatever the fuck's happening here, and number two... I got you the job!”

She stood there a moment, just dumbstruck. Then she fell back into her office chair and she began to cry, overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of intense emotion. I could understand that. Just saying it, I’d felt a bit misty-eyed myself.

She stopped to grab a tissue and blow her nose. “Well,” she said, having regained a bit of her composure, “I guess there was no need to spy after all. Fuck. Does that make you my boss now? I guess this is getting us off to a bad start, huh.”

“I am not your boss, I’m your co-lead investigator. Not bad, eh. And as such, I must ask... how the hell did this even happen?”

Sue cracked a grin. She related how she’d broken into my lab, taken the edible, passed out for a quick nap, awakened to the roast alarm, and, evidently, brought the turkey to the machine’s oversize sample bin, instead of the refrigerator. I supposed the control software would have then tried to use my latest sample as a template for the bioaccelerator, pumping out stem cells and instructing them to feed and build on the organic scaffold of... our holiday roast.

My clone was a bizarre little thing. He may as well have been an intentional parody of Calvin the absentee husband—inept little hands, squashed, cranky face, and a disproportionately sized chimeric monstrosity of a penis. The one body part Sue always declared to be my saving grace when I drove her crazy.

“I don’t get it, Sue. The machine knew it would take ossified tissue to make a penis function without bloodflow. I didn’t program that. Could it be the core, recycling one of your old experimental subroutines?”

The roast cackled, and replied with a voice that was both unmistakably me and utterly wrong.

“Heh heh heh, I guess none of us thought the machine was this far along in its readiness... seriously, though. You gotta pull the plug, human Calvin. I’m loving life at the moment, but I am also evidence of illegal activity, which could ruin everything.”

“You are,” I said flatly, scratching my chin stubble. “And yet... I could learn a fuckton from dissecting you, or taking scans of your synapses.”

“Maybe,” said the roast. “But remember, if they suspect anything, there’s not a harddrive or thumbstick or smartphone in this house that they can’t confiscate. Fucking DoD contracts.”

***

“Shall we scan?” said my husband. He had delicately deposited Turkey Calvin, whom we henceforth agreed to call “Turk” for clarity, into the miniaturized PET scanner (we’d moved the party back to his laboratory). Presently the machine began to warm up. It took me a moment to form a coherent response.

“I guess. To be honest, Cal, I’m not all there. I am tremendously horny and still a bit tweaked out on synthetic signal molecules.”

“This baby can pretty much run itself. And then, my love, we’ll have some fun punishing you for your espionage, eh?” He winked mischievously. “Seems like a win-win.”

As relieved as I was to see Calvin taking this in stride, I knew he was concealing his disappointment. I felt it too, along with a whole confused mess of other things. What did my sexual fascination with the turkey homunculus say about me? Did it count as infidelity? Was the thing its own person? Was its flesh treyf? How the fuck were we going to sanitize the data from this experiment from the transmogrifier’s core memory bank?

And not least of all...

“Hey, husband. How do we kill Turk anyway? Do we even have the right to?”

Calvin mulled this over.

“Personally, I have to agree with Turk that we have no choice—he’s gotta go. But as to how... you’re right, it’s not a trivial question. He’s programmed to regenerate until he runs out of stem cells. Even if we decapitate him, shit’ll just get weirder.

“We could throw him back in the oven,” I said, “but that’s in poor taste. Bubbe would be scowling at me from Olam HaBa. Plus, even if it isn’t painful, it seems wrong. Lonely.”

From inside the scanner came a muffled response: “A cumshot would do!”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Huh. He’s right,” said Calvin. “His growth and neural functioning are both mediated by the signaling scaffold implanted by the bioaccelerator. They depend on that tiny trickle of hormones from the scaffolding cells. So, if you fill the neck stump with bodily fluid that’s rich in signal molecules, like semen is, that should overwhelm the scaffolding, and rapidly dissolve his consciousness... So yeah, I gotta give mini-me an oral creampie.”

“I don’t know. Do you think you’ve got enough jizz stored up to do the trick?” I shot Calvin a wry grin. He blushed.

“Well, I was hoping to get back from work around 9, with good news and a bottle of red”—and he gestured to the nice looking merlot, which he’d set down in the corner—“so I abstained for a couple days. I’ve got enough, the question is can we get me good and hot so that I’ll spend it in one go?”

Turk chuckled at this, and so did I.

“About that.” I plunged my index and middle finger in the roasting pan, brought them out dripping, and pressed them to my husband’s lips. “Suck, honey... tasty, right?”

“There’s something very not right about this,” he said with a grimace, “even though I know he’s still 99.9% roast turkey, and just that little .1 percent...”

“Shuddup,” I said, stuffing my re-dipped fingers in his mouth a second time. This time he caught the authority in my voice and submitted, his tongue retreating out of the way. “Just wait a moment in silence... Now, tell me how you feel.”

His eyes went wide as I withdrew. “Oh my g—I feel great!”

“That’s the opioid and signaling cocktail at work. It’s a nice mild high, and a heck of an aphrodisiac...” My hand drifted down to Calvin’s dress pants, then to his dick, which, sure enough, was beginning to harden. “Mmm, there we go. That’s my man.”

Turk was sliding out from under the scanner into view, the scan cycle already completed.

“By the way, don’t forget to flush with fluids tonight,” he said. “Both of you. I’m radioactive, ergo, you are now radioactive.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “I think we’re going to do a lot of replenishing of fluids tonight. Let’s take this somewhere more comfortable.”