I can't even remember what we were eating. Probably pizza. She and I were out at the lakes, ditching school on one of the last days of my mediocre senior year.
She wanted to meet out there. She went to one of the high schools in Spokane. She’d told all of her friends that she was going up hiking at a mountain resort two hours north of Spokane. Instead she came east – into Idaho.
To meet me.
In the woods.
Like a bad horror flick.
I never did listen to Aunt Josie's warning. I never even thought of it again until that day by the lake.
Beth had just turned eighteen. We were celebrating by screwing and swimming and pizza and whatever else you can do as teenagers.
We were roughhousing, naked on a towel. I swear I didn't mean to, but the smooth shape of her nude butt came into view, and I bit down hard on her cheek. So hard I left a really dark mark.
Beth screeched and whirled around. Drawing her knees up to her chest, on the uneven ground she toppled hard to the side.
And knocked her temple on the rock.
She didn't move. Her eyelids fluttered. Her arms had fallen softly to her side and her legs stayed bent at the hip.
I was still reeling from my actions. I didn't respond fast enough to help her. Not that I could’ve done anything. I was a mortician-in-training, not a doctor.
Why wasn't she moving? I stared. The strong iron aroma rode the air around me.
I looked around to see who had seen. Tall grasses waving around in the soft breeze concealed us. Every bitter movement. There was nobody around the lake.
It was a normal weekday. A Wednesday, I think.
Who went to the beach on a Wednesday in June? The water was so cold. Her skin still had goosebumps.
I felt for a pulse, certain she was just playing with me.
But she wasn't awake.
She wasn't alive.
No, I killed Beth. My first real girlfriend. And I had to clean up the mess.
Aunt Josie's words flooded over me.
I didn't have a choice. I couldn't get caught.
Using all the skills I learned at Aunt Josie's, and the ones I was picking up with my dad, I did the best I could to dispose of the body. No, I didn't try to eat her all in one sitting. I did what I could to harvest the meat.
The rest of her body rolled up into a beach blanket we had brought. I’d chunked a lot of the meat from her body and rolled it into a big beach towel to make things easier to carry. I threw all of it in the trunk of my car.
I sped as fast as the speed limit would allow to my dad’s funeral home.
Calling him on my cell phone on the way there, I told him to get out front immediately.
He waited on the curb when I got there. I climbed out of the car. It didn't even bother me that she was dead. What bothered me was that I might get caught. The fact that I had killed her bothered me. Why was I bothered by the fact that I hoped I harvested the meat properly?
Dad hushed me when I tried to speak.
I'll never forget his face. His eyebrows were drawn and he couldn't stop looking around. Barely moving his lips, he spoke clearly. “I've done this before, too. You need to back the car into the loading dock in the rear of the building. We’ll unload and deal with it. Together.”
And we did.
As awful as it sounds, it was a good bonding experience for my dad and me. We shared a girl that night. But not the way it sounds.
I learned how to harvest the meat-eaters at the crematorium. I learned how to stay away from intimate relationships unless I was willing to take that chance.
It never occurred to me until later – how Dad was able to save Mom from that. And how he never ate us. Maybe when you meet the one, it makes it so that you just can't eat them, or you're not interested in eating them. Then maybe your own offspring just aren't appealing to you.
There wasn’t a lot of history papers on cannibalism. Not in our part of the world.
I hated feeling so alone.
I hated being so different. Some acquaintance friends of mine were cool enough to just be gay which only seemed to affect who they were attracted to, it was more limiting than anything. In my situation, I wasn’t discriminatory. I didn’t want to eat someone because they were a he or a she. No, I wanted to eat them all.
Being myself wasn’t an option. How did I come out and say, “Hi. I’m Cooper. I'd like to eat you.”
That might be good if I were visiting a sorority, but that's not the kind of interaction I was talking about.
~~~
I found the woman I needed for the rest of my life, when I met Jasmine in college.
Jasmine. She made my blood boil and when I was around her I didn't think about eating anything else. I didn't want to eat her. I didn't want to eat. When I was around her I couldn't think. I became someone else entirely. I became almost normal.
Her strawberry-blonde hair and blue eyes drew me in. Everything about her was fun. She didn't have any responsibilities, because her family was rich. Yet, she was serious. She took everything seriously – her studies, her decorated house, her sleek car, her figure.
Us.
I finally asked Dad about it right before he went on hiatus.
He needed a break from the business, and my mom apparently needed a break from him. As he was throwing his luggage into the car, I bit my lip. “Hey Dad, how did you know Mom was the one for you?”
Dad stopped moving, and stared over my shoulder, a faraway lost look in his eye. “When I was with your mom, I was normal. I didn't want to eat other people. I liked being that way. Felt safe. She never needed to know the… differences about me. I’ve always chased that normal feeling. You’re like me.” He met my gaze, the distance gone. “Is that how you feel about Jasmine?”
“I think so.” How did I know for sure? I still couldn't get over the fact that Beth had died years ago.
I’d gotten through college and then been hired by my dad.
It was all a cluster. Dad and I continued to harvest the meat of our patients. We had certain rules, but overall, we had a really nice system.
He was going on hiatus to see if I could do alright by myself for a while.
I wasn’t worried about the business. I could do that work in my sleep. All I could think about was how I would know if she was The One.
What I should’ve been asking was, ‘Hey Dad, how do you know girls won’t screw you over. How do you know if she's in danger? How do you know when you're going to want to kill her?’
As my dad dealt with separation issues from Mom, he had to be feeling all the confusion and worry himself.
As I would later come to feel about Jasmine.
“Ill-defined son. When you know you know? Don't rush it though. You don't want to make any mistakes like your mom made with me. She was always,” he sighed, “suspicious that I was keeping something from her. I was, but not like she thought.” He blinked back tears. “Looking back, I don't know if I should've told her from the beginning or not. Maybe you should try it. Although not one cannibal in our family history has ever come out.” He chuckled, shaking his head so a shock of hair fell across his forehead. “Can you imagine? What would the neighbors say?”
What would the neighbors say indeed?
How could I?
Chapter 4
I claimed to be vegan, but nobody really knew what that meant for me. Sure, I could eat animal meat, could even drink animal milk and other animal products.
Except that was never the kind of meat I wanted, not the kind of meat I needed.
Oh, man. I hope this memoir doesn’t suck. I had a diary once when I was kid, well, Mom called it a journal which made it less of a girl thing and more of a boy thing. I think she blames herself for what I am. What I’ve been defined as.
Labeled as.
Do I start with Dear Journal? No, that’s stupid. I can’t start out like that.
I twirled my fork between my fingers. I had taught myself to be a quiet eater long ago.
So, I could hear if anyone was trying to come around me and see what I was trying to eat.
I didn't get to eat this kind of meat often. Only when the right-aged person came through. I saw this movie one time, called iZombie. And laughed at the correlations between myself and the main character – except I’m not a zombie and I’m not dead.
My hotplate sizzled on the side, the smell – similar to bacon – causing me to salivate once again.
The morgue in my dad’s funeral home was traditionally colder. That's just how it went pretty much everywhere. So was the funeral home. We kept it at a cool 50°. More for the meat, I mean bodies, then for us.
I'm not going to start this like any other memoir. I'm not going to say I could’ve been different, if such and such happened or act like there’s some big lesson I needed to learn. Hell, I’m not even going to pretend like you care when I was born.
Let's be honest. You’re not interested in that part of me. No one ever is.
But this is where the craziness started for me. This is where I had to face who I am. Whether I accepted it or not still needs to be decided.
Because let’s be honest… this is the one place that I have to be the most honest in this whole memoir thing…
I can’t even believe this is coming out of me.
The craziness isn’t eating or killing people… the insanity of everything is what happened after my dad left for his hiatus and I tried to be normal in a very un-normal situation. I tried to be the person I am in a world waiting for the different, worshiping the different.
I define different.
Normal people are the crazy ones. Even though they taste delicious, I would be better off not seeking normalcy.
But I still want it more than anything.
That night though, while I sat in my chair at the tall table, a tapping on a window in another part of the basement, caught my attention.
I hastily threw a piece of tinfoil over my plate, wiping my hands on my cloth napkin. I shoved my chair back and leapt to my feet.
The last thing I needed was to get caught eating the customers.
I rushed out to the front room of the downstairs work area. It opened up into a large rectangular space. Nothing out of the ordinary. No one else was in there.
At two AM, every little noise set me on edge, because there shouldn't be any noises. I tucked the napkin in my back pocket. I'd long ago given up scrubs at work. I wore jeans and a T-shirt, with a white lab coat over it.
Maybe the noise was just a branch tapping against the window. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I stood there in that sterile environment with my dinner getting cold, listening. I could’ve imagined it. Or it could’ve been a prank. Either way, I couldn't get caught with the meal I had set up.
My caution up to that point was immaculate. I’d never been caught. I could never be caught. There was too much at stake.
Throwing one more glance over my shoulder, I returned to the meat locker. The place we kept the bodies.
It was even colder in there. Course it had to be. I was surrounded by a milieu of bodies and stainless-steel surfaced tables. I claimed my place smack-dab in the middle. Worry creased my brow as I considered what I’d heard.
We didn’t have trees outside the egress windows. Nothing that would tap-tap-tap with a purpose. My concern came from my instincts and my instincts were screaming their frigging heads off.
“Yoohoo!” Jasmine’s sweet voice penetrated the opening of the door. I hadn’t closed it all the way, but enough no one could see in and to keep the majority of the cold inside.
She wasn’t supposed to be there that night though. As far as I knew, she’d been planning on spending the night with a bunch of her girlfriends. With how much I loved her, my excitement at seeing her unexpectedly dimmed under the pressure of hiding my meal.
I hastily unplugged the hotplate on the side and tucked the edges of the foil tighter around the plate. I hadn’t gotten around to asking Jasmine to marry me yet. I still didn’t know who I was completely. Plus, I didn’t know if I wanted to tell her about me or if I wanted to play the game my dad had.
That's the part of the memoir I'm probably not going to want to print. The girl that I want. My love life isn’t for sale. If I put her in… doesn’t that lower what she means to me? Does she mean enough to me? Or am I giving her so much more by telling the world how much she means to me?
She was the One I could change everything for. Could – but would I?
Jasmine knew where to find me. Especially at two in the morning. She thought she was coming in to find me working.
I pushed the table to the side, hiding the chair I'd claimed.
She pushed the door open to the meat locker. “Wow, I still can't get over how much you like to be in this room.” She shivered, rubbing her upper arms with their hands. “Oh, perfect timing. You’re on your lunch break.”
Her strawberry-blonde hair lay in waves past her shoulders. A slight splattering of freckles across her nose highlighted the blue of her eyes. She was petite but worked out. I always wondered what she tasted like.
“Yeah, I'm just cleaning up in here.” I waved my hand at my table as if it wasn't worth considering. Truth was, it was the best slice of meat I'd had in eight months. A little bit of resentment curled inside me. What healthy, red-blood twenty-seven-year-old male wasn't more interested in getting a piece than eating a piece.
Apparently, me.
She walked towards me, glancing at the plate. “You still have some left. I haven't eaten dinner yet. It's so late. I'm so hungry. Xan wouldn’t stop for food. She’s such a wench. Do you mind?”
When we ate at restaurants, of course I didn't mind. When we ate at her house or mine, of course I didn't mind. Because that was food I didn’t care about. That was food most people cared about.
But this… This was my food. My entrée. This was meat that most people wouldn't touch.
She picked up my fork and knife, pushing the tinfoil sheet aside. “Oh, this looks good. Did you cook this on the hotplate? We might have to try that at the house.” She cut a one inch by one-inch chunk off the steak I had procured earlier. She then dipped it in the ketchup I'd had for the French fries.
In horror, I groaned inwardly. Don't ruin the meat with ketchup. I couldn’t look away as she licked her lips. Watching her eat that bite would be the most sensual thing I’d ever experienced. She’d taste the linear muscle fibers – more palpable in human flesh than beef. The sharply clean tang that most omnivorous meat didn’t have. This person I had on my plate had to have been a vegetarian, there was a distinct lack of metallic iron to the flavor.
I couldn’t look away. But the reality of the moment slammed me into some kind of hyper-sensitivity.
Jasmine motioned towards the door with my aloft fork. “There was a car outside. Were you expecting someone? Or did someone just leave?” She arched her eyebrow at me, a slight suspicion in her eyes.
As if I had people in and out of this room. Living ones anyway. Jasmine was just like other girls, she had her jealousy moments, too. If the situation weren’t so inappropriate, I’d grin and twirl her around, declaring she was the only girl I knew who would come to a morgue to have sex amongst the dead bodies.
I couldn't take my eyes off the food on the fork though. There were so many reasons why I couldn’t let her eat the meat.
First of all, cannibalism isn’t something you just do. It’s a distinct choice you make, even though you might be born that way. Like I was. I had to be. There was no other explanation for why I wanted to eat the hot chick’s rounded butt cheek and other guys wanted to squeeze it.
Second, cannibalism is a decidedly lonely lifestyle. There isn’t a Homosapien Section at the grocery store next to the Gluten Free aisle.
Cannibalism isn’t something everyone accepts.
I bit my lip, as she dipped the meat again in the condiment.
How did I tell her? A part of me wanted her to eat it. Then we would be on the sa
me level. Then we would be comrades. We would be co-conspirators. She unwillingly. But sometimes sacrifices had to be made.
But… I loved her. And I didn't want her to make choices without being informed. I held up my hand and stepped forward. “Jasmine, put the food down.”
With the bite halfway to her mouth, she froze. Disbelief held her mouth open.
She slowly lowered the fork to the plate and put her hand on her hip. “Are you kidding me? Why? You never had any problem sharing before. What is going on? Is that a girl that just left? Because if you want to break up, I'm fine with that. I don't need you.” But hurt and embarrassment shadowed her eyes.
Of course, she needed me, just like I needed her. We had been together for three years, and we needed each other. It was that simple.
I sidled up beside her and traced her smooth cheek with my finger. I tipped her chin up and forced her to look at me, even as a tear slid down her cheek. “It’s late, honey. There’s never going to be anyone else for me. Stop acting like you don’t need me. Because I need you.”
She stared at me for a moment and then launched herself into my arms, her ravenous kiss taking me off-guard. One thing Jasmine wasn’t was reserved.
I grabbed her hips and my relief at not having to share my meat and my shame released an onslaught of endorphins. I rose to the occasion and yanked the thin material of her skirt up her long legs, I’d probably never get to try, and screwed her right there where we stood.
Our spent breath mingled as she rested her forehead against mine. “Can I, please, have a bite now? It smells amazing.”
To my embarrassment and everlasting shame, I was more concerned with why I didn’t want to tell her, then why I should. And another part of me felt like maybe she’d felt the need to trade herself for a piece of my meal which came from how she was raised – by rich-ass parents who loved their daughter with material things rather than true emotion.
Looking back now, things would've been a lot different if I had just been upfront with Jasmine at the beginning. Talk to her about it there. Instead of letting her run away.
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