Marie/ Entry 18
I had another nightmare last night.
All I could see at first was the brown masked face of my German Shepard. He's barking at something outside. I'm not outside, but I know that he's barking at me. I know that outside me wants to roast him over a spit. I look down at my hand, my exposed skeleton. I look up, and I'm outside. The fire is going. The exposed muscle of the animal hanging over the pit is not recognizable. I know it's Trapper, but it is also Karla. Then I see Karla's face growing fur and bursting outward. She turns into a brown masked werewolf howling into my ear. The howling stops. The face is mine. My jaw is dropping. My teeth sharpening. My eyes become empty pits. Antlers grow from my head, and I whistle. I whistle without lips. It's a haunting noise from deep in my throat.
I wake up sweating under the lip of an open cave. The snowfall outside has slowed down. It pinches my skin, but it is beautiful.
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I don't know what came over me, but I didn't have a bowl. So, I held a handful of guts over the fire. Palm down, so the guts cooked first,
I've heard that intestines taste like shit. It makes sense since they are long tubes full of shit being processed, but those slimy tubes tasted like spicy sweet beef jerky. I must have been chewing on them for hours before I had to cook another pocket full.
After three or four helpings, my hand had begun to cook. I couldn't feel it because of the frostbite.
I bit into it. The feeling of teeth scraping my hand clean vaguely registered, but I felt no pain. I could see my finger bones when I was done.
I wasn't thinking of anything except meat. I was coping, I think. Everything was meat. The trees, the cave, the people, the snow. I still knew I couldn't eat rocks and trees, but I sat there laughing as I shoveled watery snow butter into my face with one hand. With my skeleton hand, I pierced deflated lungs and cooked them like hot dogs.
I ate it all while I sat there shaking and laughing. I was content, happy even, until the meat ran out. Now I'm writing this, but it can't distract me from the hunger. I'm still so hungry!
But now I hear voices from deep in the cave. Maybe they are meat?
YOU ARE READING
Wendigo Island (ONC2024)
TerrorYour greatest fear is monsters in the dark. The last thing you expect is to become the monster in the dark. This story is not about heroes. This story is about ripping away any pretense you have about what it means to be human. At the end of the day...
