Cannibal

Cannibal

         I stared at him as one would a sleeping lion stumbled upon in the high grass of an African veldt. But I was a long way from Africa, and he was certainly no lion.

         He was worse.

         I found him sitting on my couch one night, and when I saw his face my mind screeched to a halt and shattered like crystal. My soul deserted me. I held my breath and shut my eyes, but when I opened them once more, I found that the nightmare hadn’t vanished. In fact, he seemed to have grown larger, more real, rooted to my sofa.

         At that very moment, I realized that I’d never sit on that sofa again, nor snore away lazy June mornings on it, nor make love to my wife atop it.

         My wife!

         He sat there, bare-chested, smeared with fluids I instinctively knew belong within the confines of my wife’s supple body, a woman whose flame had been indubitably snuffed by the giant gore-caked hand that rested atop one of wine-colored pillows like a carrion-gorged bird of prey.

         “Sarah?” I croaked.

         “Ruined,” he growled. He spat a piece of chewed flesh in my direction.

         He began chuckling so heartily that the tremendous raised scar on his abdomen began to undulate and writhe like a thick white serpent beneath the fine crimson veil of my wife’s blood. Sweat slowly coursed the fine network of scars above his brow.

         “And now to ruin you,” he intoned, rising from the couch.

         Truth was that he had been ruined for quite some time.

         His father would often goad him into bloody battles by beating his mother in front of him. It worked every time. He’d walk in from a night of drinking and fighting and his father would be wet with his mother’s blood and tears.

         In his earlier years, his father often got the best of him and beat him unconscious with whatever object was at arm’s length. He often woke up sprawled next to his mother, who was usually on her knees vomiting blood into a towel, with his forehead split wide, his face a mask of scarlet.

         His father beat him well and often, save one time in particular.

         One evening, he had returned home to see his father dragging his mother by great tufts of her blood-matted hair, her bruised breasts swinging like purpled sides of meat from her torn blouse.

         The acrid waft of burned steak from a dinner long ignored bit at the inside of his nose as he stood in the doorway watching the mayhem.

         His father punched his mother in the skull and knocked her to the crimson-streaked linoleum. He kicked her in the neck and in the face. Cockroaches rushed beneath the stove to avoid the scrum.

         Two more of what remained of her teeth skittered across the cluttered floor.

         He took a long pull from the bottle of Jim Beam he’d been carrying before smashing it against the wall, startling his father. His mother slumped to the floor, crushed and oozing.

         “What do you want, pussy?” his father taunted. “C’mon, you piece of shit.”

         He looked through his father, and, with the neck of the broken bottle still in his hand, lifted his shirt, and carved a deep and glistening furrow across his stomach, howling like a starved wolf.

         His father’s jaw unhinged and hung slack.

         “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he screamed at his son.

         But by that time, he was upon his father. He was seething with hatred carried over from many years, many beatings, many scars.

         His first punch exploded his father’s orbital bone like a glass ashtray dropped on concrete. The displaced eye bounced helplessly on the rapidly swelling flesh. The second punch landed just above his father’s ear, cracking his skull and beginning the rush of blood that would ultimately drown his brain.

         “What the fuck are you doing, you asshole!” his mother screamed through her desecrated mouth. “Get off him! Police!” she yelled through the broken window. “Police!”

         His rage not yet spent, he released his father's lifeless body and turned on his mother, biting her throat, his teeth meeting in her windpipe. When he pulled back, a large hunk of throat came with him while his mother lay quivering and gurgling in death’s mighty throes.

         He spat out none of the meat.

         He ran off into the night and was never seen again.

         Until that night.

         I was face to face with a man who was part wolverine and part garbage disposal. A man who could crush bone and shred flesh then blame it on Nature’s allowance of his existence.

         Or Nature’s error.

         He covered the distance between us in three hefty strides; I back-peddled through wet cement.

         He seized me by the throat.

         “I am going to eat your fucking heart and shit your love,” he grunted.

         He shoved me against the wall, sending pictures of happier times, ancient history now, hurtling to the floor.

         As his lips peeled back from his teeth, I wished myself unborn.

         A sharp blow to the head sent me to all fours.

         “Get away from the bars, you carnivorous fuck.”

         I turned and glared and the uniformed prick who had clubbed me like a seal, and began drooling at the thoughts of tearing his spine out through his ass and flushing his eyes down the fucking toilet.

         Wounded, I lumbered back to my cot and collapsed, bleeding from the split plum growing on my scalp, staining the filthy pillow further.

         Running my finger along the equatorial scar on my gut, I smirked, and wondered who had been devoured after all…

mothermeatloaf

(c) 2002