The Incredible Vanishing Cannibal

by Kevin Risk

Awareness came to him slowly. He felt cold steel under his back, he felt…

…Thick, humid sunlight licking his skin. He looked at his hands—they were the hands of a child, and the right thumb was covered with a dark paste. He wondered what it was. He watched as that same thumb turned downward, pressed against the ground, and crushed one of a hundred scurrying ants. Squish. That explained the paste. He looked up, and through the humid haze of heat and dream, he saw his parents sitting on the dock. They looked back at him, all smiles and fondness, and his dad gave him a great big wave. He did not wave back. Squish. Something about his parents was different. They were happier than he’d ever seen them. He did not yet know that his parents, after years of struggling and scraping, were finally out of debt. The cabin was the first big purchase they made because they could, not because they had to. He later supposed that, to them, it was the promise of idyllic family weekends, of fishing, of playing tag between the trees, of barbecues, and of sing-alongs. It was the promise of a new beginning. At least, it was supposed to be. Squish…

His eyelids parted drowsily. The muddy blurs around him wobbled and resolved into the dim interior of the prison transport van. He was lying on the floor, an ungainly pile of cramps and chains. He looked around the van and realized there was no escort; he was completely alone. The thought of escape flickered through his mind, but before he could act on it, he was swallowed by darkness again.

…He was in the cabin. It was dark, and his hands—now the hands of a man—were wrapped around the iron handle of a fireplace poker. The other end of the poker was embedded in a stranger’s chest. The stranger dropped to the ground and bled and bled and gasped and struggled until he died. He stood above the body, utterly perplexed. He did not mean to kill the stranger. He had never killed a person in his life. All he wanted to do that night was have a little nap on the sofa, but how the hell was he supposed to do that after the stranger fumbled through the window? They got into a fight, and then this happened. This oddity. This weirdness. But that’s what life does. It turns. And when it turns, you either turn with it, or you end up in the ditch. That’s when he heard a dry creaking sound—it was Appetite. Appetite was a funny little character that lived inside him. It looked like a Mardi Gras skeleton that wore Bermuda shorts and a straw hat. It sat quietly in an old rocker until something brought it to life, and then it would begin rocking back and fourth, its chair creak-creak-creaking as it did. Of course, when it was really excited, Appetite not only rocked, it whispered…

The van came back into focus. He tried to blink away the tangle of dreams, but they clung to the underside of his brain. “Damn sedative,” he thought. He moved his head and felt a stiff button of pain in his temple. He must have hit it against something when the guards dumped him on the floor. But why didn’t they secure him? He moved his cuffed hands to one side and rolled onto his back. He shook his feet free of the short length of chain that connected his ankles, and pushed himself up. There was a thin scythe of light at the edge of the door. They hadn’t closed it properly. He paused, wondering if there were burly policemen on the other side waiting to thump him with their batons and pistol butts. There was only one way to find out.

A hard afternoon sun beat through the open van door. It made his head hurt. He leaned into the air and turned his oblong face from the right, to the left, and back. He saw no one. It was suspicious, but he would have been a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity, so he shuffled down to the road, carefully watching for signs of life—but there was nothing: no bustling, no noise, no traffic, and no people. The world was draped in stillness.

He followed the road, past vacant side streets and shattered storefronts. He didn’t even see a car for twenty minutes, and the one he finally did see was perched on the sidewalk, its front end wrapped around a telephone pole. He approached it slowly, leaning over to see if anyone was still inside. All he saw were empty seats stained with blood. He bent down again to be sure no one was crouched on the floor, and the mangled rearview mirror caught a reflection of the sun, blinding him with a sudden white star burst.

…He saw bright, oily sunlight, and then a dark cabin and an iron handle in his hands…

Something in his mind always pulled him back to the cabin. That wasn’t surprising; it was a new beginning, though not the one his parents had hoped for. Within five years of buying that cabin they were having other problems. He could tell because he heard them arguing sometimes. It was possible it had something to do with him; he wasn’t really sure. Whatever the reason, his parents stopped going to the cabin, as if they realized the promise it once offered was an empty one. He still went, though.

…But that’s what life does. It turns. And when it turns, you either turn with it, or end up in the ditch. That’s when he heard a dry creaking sound. It was Appetite. And it wasn’t only rocking, it was whispering, begging him to try something new. He looked at the small hole in the stranger’s chest that had been made by the poker, and inserted his index finger into the wound. Squish. That made him smile. He smelled the blood on his finger and touched it to his lip. Appetite liked that. He stuck his finger into the wound again. Squish. He hooked it, brought it out, and then put it in his mouth. The experience was at once dizzying and deeply satisfying, as though he finally satiated a craving he did not know he had. That was the moment. That was the beginning. He was ushered into a new phase of life, one from which return was not possible…

As the afternoon grew older, the arcing sun lost none of its bite. He still had not seen a single person, and it was making him mad. The guards could have woken him up and taken him along, but they didn’t. They left him, which wasn’t really surprising. As a matter of history, people didn’t like him around. People had never liked him around. “Assholes,” he thought.

He once saw a movie on TV. In the movie, a priest was talking to a guy—the kind of guy who made his money off the backs of orphans, and ate manatee tartare every other Thursday night. He was going to knock down a women’s shelter so he could build a swanky new nightclub, and the priest was telling him that it was a sin to turn away from his fellow man. And in the middle of his argument, the priest froze and made a face, as if trying to express the horror and emptiness that lay ahead of the guy. It was strange.

It reminded him of all the people who had turned away from him. He hoped something bad would happen to them, and if it didn’t, he hoped they’d meet that freaky priest. But considering what happened to the city, it was likely something bad did happen to them—at least to some of them.

He found some bolt cutters in a hardware store and dispensed with his shackles. Having regained the use of his limbs, he entered a pharmacy and scrambled over the tipped shelves and spilled merchandise until he found the analgesics. He opened a box and swallowed two pills. Then, in hopes he’d run into someone who was nice to look at, he stuffed a handful of condoms in his pocket, and then stepped back onto the street.

Though he did not find a person, he found several pieces of one not far away on the sidewalk. There was a leg, a foot, an arm, and something that looked like a jaw. The edges of the limbs didn’t look cut so much as ripped. He tried to imagine what could have been strong enough to do that. He studied the pulpy bit that looked like a jaw. Once upon a time it was connected to a head and could have told him a joke. But all things change with time.

For example, he remembered how playful and affectionate his mother was when he was young, but the day she found a shallow grave in the backyard, she wasn’t very playful or affectionate at all.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked him, standing near a loose patch of earth.

He shook his little head.

“Are you sure?”

He looked closer, and he saw that some of the dirt had been dug away by tiny paws, revealing a dead fox. He shook his head again.

“The raccoons found it. It’s been –” she covered her mouth. “It’s been…opened.”

He said nothing.

“I found blood on one of your shirts while I was doing the laundry this morning.”

Now he knew he had to say something. “I found it.”

“The fox?”

“Behind the wall at the end of the yard. It must have come up the ravine. But I swear I didn’t hurt it. I found it like that. I thought… I thought it should be buried. So it could go to heaven.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Or your father?”

He looked at her blankly for a moment. “I’m not supposed to touch strange animals. I didn’t want you to get mad at me.” This last part was true, though he was never able to articulate why.

She looked at him for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she nodded. “But next time find your father or me. Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Go on.”

Thankfully, she never found the garden saw he used.

Though his parents never spoke of it again, that unqualified love that radiated from them at the cabin, only four years before, never returned.

A year later, a neighborhood dog went missing. His parents and neighbors asked him about it, and even though he told them he was blameless, no one seemed to trust him. His friends said they believed him, but he could tell they didn’t mean it. They were saying what he wanted to hear. Over the coming months, most of them began spending less time with him. One or two even pretended they couldn’t see him, as if he were make-believe.

When he had his day in court, the judge and jury didn’t want to spend much time looking at him, either. So they said he should be locked up. Out of sight. Away from everyone. And his parents didn’t even bother to show up when the verdict was read.

Everyone wanted to forget he existed and it made him mad as hell. Nothing can exist without being seen. It falls into an abyss of nothingness. It’s the reason otherwise good people can forget about things like genocide. If they don’t see it, it stops being real. That meant willful forgetfulness was no better than murder. And as he looked at the deserted wasteland around him, he was beginning to wonder if he had been shoved into that same abyss.

“Dumb fuckin’ ideas,” he thought. Still, they didn’t stop nagging him. He kicked at a bottle lying in the gutter, sending it spiraling across four lanes of emptiness.

The sun sank below the horizon, setting the sky ablaze. He turned down a little street and saw a woman—a live woman—sitting in the middle of the road. She was hunched over, facing the opposite direction.

“Hey!” he called.

She groaned like a dying pig, barely alive.

“Goddamnit,” he muttered.

Again, he became aware of the creaking. Somewhere in the dark, Appetite was rocking back and fourth to the lazy, lawless rhythm of the day. And it whispered.

“Alright,” he thought.

Normally he wouldn’t give in this easily, but she was going to die anyway and he was pissed off.

He moved quickly and quietly. He came up behind her, and wrapped his arms around her torso, constricting her. He bit down hard, piercing the skin on her neck. The skin was strangely cool against his tongue. He expected to hear her scream; instead, she moaned drowsily, and looked at him with her glassy eyes. From his position over her shoulder, he saw her intestines hanging out of a yawning gash in her midsection. The injury didn’t bother her at all.

A low rumble started in her belly, swelled up, and a wisp of a word rose off it. It sounded like: “Bbbrrrrraaaaaaiiiiinnnnnssssss…”

A trickle of her blood slipped down his throat, and it made his stomach convulse. His grip on her loosened, and the woman seized her opportunity to get up, grab him, and bite deeply into his face. He wailed and tried to wrestle free, but could not.

Soon he stopped struggling, and she let him crash to the ground. She touched the wound on his face with a clumsy, prodding finger. Squish. Once she confirmed her would-be attacker was neutralized, she staggered away.

He knew what was supposed to come next: he was supposed to bleed and bleed until he died. But that’s not what happened at all. His organs stiffened. His internal valves slackened, sending fluids spilling through his body. Yet death as he knew it did not come. Instead, conscious thought and human feeling unraveled, leaving behind nothing but emptiness—only Appetite remained. It not only remained, it became more powerful, deepening his hunger for flesh. At last, his heart broke rhythm and slowed. This was the moment. It was an end. It was a beginning. As his heart ceased beating, he was ushered into a new phase of “life,” one from which return was not possible. His memory, his sense of self—everything he was and ever had been slipped into the abyss, and tumbled out of existence.

And he was gone.