TIMELINE – Time: 0376 Hrs. Day: Wednesday or Saturday (Can’t remember). Month: December. Menstrual cycle: Full moon.
LOCATION – The Water Under The Burned Bridge, Battersea St., Dunhamphries, Northwickhouseshire-uopn-Wenslydale, Canada.
Notez-Bien: This article is not for the faint of heart. As a hobbyist in anthropology, I have observed many different practices of mankind, mostly from a low-lying bunker of cloth and poly-fibrous semi-flexible corrugated insulation that is apparently invisible, and yet never have I witnessed such a horrific display of the Hobbesian “life of man in nature” coming to the forefront in our contemporary society. Read it, and forevermore become aware of the fragility of the thin crust of civilization, politesse, and sanity of those who surround you.
When most of us think of cannibalism, it is in a comedic sense. Who doesn’t have fond memories from their youth of turning on the TV and watching, entranced, as cartoon characters fantasied about eating one another. Whether it was in a charmingly dated reference to the practice of cannibalism among pacific island natives (who apparently found the best way of cooking people to be putting them in a big cauldron and dancing around it in a circle), or the mesmerizing cartoon leitmotif of people stranded on a boat or island imagining each other as fully cooked chickens, the first thing that most of us associate with cannibalism is laughter.
But cannibalism also has a dark side. Each year at the festival of Saturnalia, anthropophagy enthusiasts in the guise of children eat thousands of human forms, in a grisly ritual that would disturb the mind of any sane being. The craving they nurture in their young minds for human flesh overrides their good sense, and the cracked and twisted versions of mankind that they carve out of sugared and gingered dough shows how unavoidable their desires become. Not content with consuming the unadorned, naked, and raw substance of the man they have summoned out of nothingness for their own pleasure, they invent a new torture for their unwilling and helpless victim. They bake it. They put these men in an inescapable gas oven at a high temperature and wait. It is a certain crispness they desire in the flesh of the small being, a golden colour in the formerly Once this gruesome process is completed, they begin anew at the process of humanizing this homo ex gingibus. “Anew,” for you see, they had already begun at the time they had carved the sacrifice initially – they not only brought a single man into existence, but acted as a malevolent demiurge in the creation of an entire falsified world to surround him. Evergreen trees, houses, gifts, trains, dogs, snowmen – an entire world revolving around these people, all of it a lie, all to humanize them. But the destruction of such a bland world wrought out of a single colour would be meaningless to these seekers after the forbidden repast of what the Zambesi tribesmen of east Africa have forever called “Long Pig”. After the men and women they have crafted have had the heat exact brutal changes to their bodies, the brutish lords of their demise grant them a series of gaudy and colourful boons. They clothe their victims, adorn them with jewels, decorate their newly-formed mansions with warm and welcoming icing, and style the traditional tannenbaum with all descriptions of pretty baubles and accoutrements. They give them gifts, and family, and pets, and hobbies, and strive as strongly as they can to give them true happiness after the trial by literal fire they had endured not long ago. But this is not generosity. It is cruelty. It is the desire to make these small men and women in to real human beings, to give them emotions and desires by giving them a spouse and possessions, to give them not just a house but a home so that it means something when it is taken away, and to give them a world to live in, so that it can be destroyed and the despair experienced by the object of their brutality can be total.
Once humanized, the ritual of consumption commences. Nor is this the enshrined cannibalism of the transubstantiation of the body of Christ, or the transmogrification of carrots into hilarious pretend penises. The helpless beings to which so much sentience has been forcibly transferred are one-by-one dismembered and consumed. Their smiling faces become grimaces as their limbs slowly disappear – for most of the anthropophagraphers believe that the most supreme of joys can be gained from this ritual only when the face gives the appearance of consciousness until the man’s final end. The process is slow and grinding, yet it wears not at all on the nerves or the conscience of the child consuming the flesh of another humanized and glorified person. Much the same behavior is evident in the consumption of the comestible known as “Candied Gelatin-based Bears,” which suffer the same loss of limbs and torsos before succumbing to and extremely painful death only after their head is fully consumed. However, there is not the same process of humanization, and so less joy is in evidence on the face of the children. No, taste is not the explanation for this phenomenon. The cannibalism of the contemporary North American child springs from a simple love of cruelty towards one’s fellow man.
The men and women these children create are meant only to be consumed. The world created for them is an altar for ritual cannibalism, upon which their lives are gruesomely sacrificed to sate the mad desires of a god as savage and arbitrary as Ouranos who forged the sky and ate his young. The apocalypse our world was supposed to suffer was an invention, but for these poor doughty souls the Apocalypse is real and present and violent.
And who is responsible for this grim reminder of the earliest and most vicious days of our civilization invading our modern, sterile, homely kitchens? The very parents of the child themselves! They remember the ritual as the same violent induction into the human race that they yearly celebrated as children, and so they propagate the desire to consume manflesh to their children as well, trapping our society in an endless cycle of desire to strip the soft meat of our nieghbour’s thighs from their bones and thrust it down our own gullets and those of our children. We must, as a society, rise up against this behavior! We must break the shackles of tradition and burst into a glorious new world where we try to eat fewer people! Anti-cannibals of the world UNITE! You have nothing to lose but a tasty snack now and then!
Major Basil Paprika is a freelance writer for Rooters and The Thymes of Laudanum. Donations to his cause can be sent to Brickstoleunderthestickywicket St., Moosejaw, Greenwich.
Two Grenadiers 