Flesh

 

Puppies grow fast. They start out as these smallish creatures, and then their paws get bigger than their heads, and before you know it, they’re fifty pounds and strong. Spike had grown into a handsome little mutt, with her thick, straight fur and long ears. She bowled me over as soon as I stepped in from church. Jeremy bent down and petted her head. I walked to my room with the intention of changing into clothes that actually fit. Another thing about puppies: they apparently enjoy watching humans do things such as sit on the toilet and change clothes. I wasn’t in the mood to kick Spike out, so she settled on my bed and observed my every move with chocolate eyes and an open mouth.

I changed into sweatpants and a tee-shirt, feeling less than conscious about being watched. After the transformation, I crawled up beside her on the mattress. “Rrr.” I pretended to growl at her.

Her ears perked up, and she tensed.

“Rrr.” I tried again. She jumped on top of me and covered my face in a thick sheet of dog slobber. “Ew.” I laughed like a crazy person. If you’ve never been tackled by a large puppy with bad breath and licked in the face, you have no idea how weird it feels. If you have, then you can’t blame me. I grabbed her around the neck and play-wrestled for a while, until she got free and sprinted to the other side of my room, where she lowered her head to the ground and wagged her tail.

Needless to say, by the time I’d finished playing with Spike, my anger towards Karen had subsided quite a bit. Rather than rush anything and start planning or shopping now, I decided to spend the rest of the day doing laundry and watching my CSI DVD’s. I counted the cans of soup and fruit in the cabinets, making sure that there were enough to last me through the rest of the week, and then grabbed an apple.

I bit into the sweet, juicy golden fruit. Bite marks in apple flesh stared back at me. I wondered if apples or any other kinds of fruit ever felt pain, the way animals do. Probably not, I decided after realizing that they didn’t appear to have a nervous system, or really any kind of system. I bit again, felt my teeth penetrate the smooth skin and dig into the meat of it. What would it be like to eat human flesh, instead of fruit flesh? Hannibal had cannibalistic tendencies. Why? What was it that drove him to eat humans? The Donner party had resorted to eating their dead, but that was purely for survival reasons. Would I eat somebody else if my life depended on it?

I looked around the house. Mom, I knew, was in bed, sleeping off her workweek. Dad was in the garage, tinkering with something that one of us would have to fix later. Would I eat them if it meant my survival? Only if they died before I did. I looked at Spike, lying next to me on the sofa, nose on paws, eyes closed. Spike would live; dogs ate less than humans. I’d rather starve to death than eat my friends.

I finished the apple and dumped the core in the garbage, and dumped myself back on the sofa to rot my brain with more CSI.

 

Reviews

[Brie]

This has to be my favorite chapter so far! Maybe its because I adore dogs, but all the same i loved it! And i HAVE been in that doggie slobber situation! Only my dogs are smallish and kinda chubby.... but slobber a lot! Keep going!
-Brie