Eat.
A sick account of modern cannibalism, redemption and survival, by Alex Moore
Chapter One: Fresh Meat
The blood scampers from my lips in a rapid dribble, desperate for escape and perhaps even redemption for the torture I had dealt to its host. I'm on my knees, panting and gasping and lapping up the blood from my fingers. Anything but thinking.
My developed incisors unknowingly scathe my inner cheeks and slice tiny cuts into my tongue – my teeth, so sharp from… the eating… click together as they devour the final chunks of raw lung from my "girlfriend". Her eyes, the gorgeous green orbs of light that once filled me with joy and lustful hunger, seem to shimmer one more time before they go blank and cloudy and still. Even when I've shoved all that I can down my bloodstained throat, and bits of her intestines (which literally taste like shit – I never eat them) are laying in greasy ropes along the dirty tile floor, I can still feel her pretty little eyes digging into me.
Her chest cavity is split open and empty. Ribs are torn aside and mangled into disfigured positions – all in my desperation to get inside of her, to fulfill my addiction. She was sweating with fear when she died, and the salty droplets still stick to her corpse. In one swift motion I lick them away from her cold and clammy skin, then lay back and begin to gnaw on my crusty fingernails for a few minutes before I stop myself. It's a nasty habit and the last thing I want to pick up is a disgusting habit like nail-biting.
The taste of her is still potent and dynamic in my mouth. My breath reeks of lung meat – my favorite part. The flavor of lung, the smooth and grotesque oyster-like sensation that it makes when it slides down my throat, the way I only have to chew a few times for it to disintegrate into mush… it's one of my favorite meals.
I lean back into a deep calm and glance at my food. Even with her chest split open and the remains of her body parts strewn in a messy jumble along the tile, her face continues to look so cute and attractive to me, as it was when I first met her. Her features are radiant and eye-catching, and her now blood stained and matted hair had once glowed a sugary brownish gold and always managed to look wet. Her skin, dotted with small contusions, is light brown, and her cheeks were full and always smiling. Her is neck wrung and bruised and split wide open (esophagus has a rubbery, uncooked bacon taste to it) and I vividly recall that her voice was swift and smooth, with a slight accent that reflected a little bit of everything. She spoke fluent Spanish, which made her even more desirable. ...But it was her eyes that drew me to her in the first place. Those unique and vivid swamp green eyes that used to burn with anger and fear, and that continued to stare at me even in death.
I have never eaten eyes. Tried them, sure – I've had every piece of the female human body in my stomach at one time or another, and my favorite still remains the lung. But eyeballs – they're too hard and chewy on the inside, which makes me feel like I'm eating chicken gristle. I have an addiction and I must respect that, but I always end up spitting out the majority of the eyeball. But hers… they just look so tempting, just blank and clouded over and waiting for me. I lean over her body and give her left eye a quick once-over with my tongue – unsurprisingly, I find it salty and unappetizing. Sorry, sweetheart – you'll have to continue to watch the corruption of man, even as you body lies here, violated and disfigured. I rise to my feet and make no motion close her eyes, to put her at peace. It doesn't matter – closed eyes aren't an issue when a person's corpse is mutilated and emptied of their organs and soul.
My hunger has been fulfilled, at least for the next week or so. They'll be looking for her in a few hours – I've used my time too freely, thinking and tasting and reminiscing when all I should have been doing was shoving food down my throat and taming the demon deep inside. Eat and move on. Eat and move on.
I crack my knuckles and my neck and let my sneakers glide through the puddle of blood and casually, fluidly step over the cadaver. They'll want to catch me and torture me, rip my fingernails off, scalp me, slit me open, crucify me. But addicts know how to hide, and hide well. I don't raise a finger to clean up my mess. They'll find her – her cold body huddled up in the corner of the school cafeteria, her eyes open and her chest hollow - and after DNA testing, they'll know it's me. After a while, they'll stop doing the testing and conclude that there's only one sick fuck out there that would do this kind of thing to women – me.
I'll proudly wear the title.
The blood sticks to my shoes, adding yet another layer of hard-to-clean bodily fluids to them. My green collared polo shirt is now a smudged brown, and my acid-washed blue jeans now show off caked-on dirt and blood. My hair has gravel in it from the struggle (she had given a good fight for her life) and it is one of the few things on me that isn't drenched in blood. It's too dry as usual, and I scratch the front of my scalp, releasing thousands of tiny, crusty little dandruff flakes. I see a tick fall, and for a moment, I –
Someone's here. It's faint, but someone is coming this way, a male, perhaps 30 to 50 years old and 200 pounds, according to the footsteps. A cop, maybe. If not, I can take him down. But I don't take my chances – I scamper away and soundlessly dive into a broken pizza oven, softly shutting the door. One of the first places they'll look.
I'm standing. This is one of those ovens that looks like a refrigerator and is full of racks to cook the pizza on. Luckily, the only rack left inside is above my head. Personally I can't stand pizza, but if I must partake in eating it, I bury it with meat - cooked roast beef - and I tell them I have a protein deficiency.
I hate dancing for the cameras. Making myself seem normal until I find a girl I like. A girl that tastes good when I kiss her and is okay with it when I "accidentally" cut her tongue to make the experience taste even better for me.
Blood, meat and Gatorade are the only things I can tolerate – pizza is one of the last things I would eat for a cover-up, but somehow I end up nibbling it every so often. Not only is bread near-poison to me by this point, but that insipid sauce that Americans just drench it with? Ugh. The thought alone tosses the taste into my mouth, and I suck my dirty thumb to get the flavor of blood back. There I go again with my bad habits – I've heard thumb sucking can give a person buck teeth. I know it's not true, but the thought of myself with razor sharp buck teeth makes me put my hand down and shove it deep into my pocket.
I can't see anything and the subtle sound of aluminum is driving me insane. The oven smells like burnt hair, and, as I place my lean bloody fingers on the sides of this cramped little space, I find that the walls are crusty and scorched. No wonder the food tasted like shit – I really must raise my standards with the schools I choose. I'm skilled enough to evade high-paid cops going after the brutal murderer of some rich little blonde chick. I've done this process enough times.
The footsteps are close enough now, and I stop thinking. I focus everything onto the sounds around me.
…tile…tile… his footsteps change surfaces, now he's on concrete…. Three more steps onto the concrete floor. He's about twenty feet away from me now based on the sound, but the oven walls could be misleading me. …step… another one… God, he's going slowly. He's looking for something, and he knows where to look – I can't hear anything but his footsteps, no clanging of pots, no stupid "Hmm", no walking in circles. This man isn't associated with the police and I know it. My head is still concentrating as my fingers slowly slip from my pocket and subtly press on the door.
He doesn't notice as the door of the oven noiselessly swings open and my murderer silhouette slinks deeper into the mostly aluminum kitchen. This place is clean and I'm dripping blood all over it; this place is an echo machine and I have wet squeaky shoes; this place is the perfect setup for a smart person to find me, and I just hope this guy fits the bill. I want him to catch me – I'll kill him with my bare hands, just so I can leave my fingerprints and saliva and hair follicles all over him, just so I can confuse the cops even more than I already have.
I'm surrounded by butcher knives – how very convenient. I pluck the biggest one off the shelf and palm it, just in case. Just in case I want to cut off a little snack.
They'll never find me.