A Boy Eaten

September 1999
RuneSmith...

It was raining hard and miserable that day when the boy's parents
brought him home from the hospital. New parents they were, and so
happy to have a new baby. I went over to their house, gave them a
baby gift, and coddled over the tiny tot. He was pink and chubby.
I squeezed his fat legs and announced, "He's a healthy one!" I
smiled at his mother.

His mother, Nancy, picked up her newborn boy, "Steven's gonna be a

big strong boy when he grows up." She looked at me and said, "He's
almost nine pounds."

Oh! Nancy and her husband Robert were proud of their new son.

I watched Steven grow up. He lived across the street and beyond a
curve in the road. My kids were grown and had moved away long ago.
My wife, bless her heart, had died of cancer several years ago.
Living alone had probably made me weird. For instance, I had quit
work and just stayed home writing stupid love novels, which made a
skimpy living.

While I wrote love stories for a living, I also voraciously read

stories about cannibalism. Funny, but the two don't go together
very well. A friend of mine was a predator. He sought out victims
who were homeless. He'd befriend them, bring them to his house,
subsequently kill, and eat them. He liked sharing the meat with
me. I had to admit that human meat tastes good.

Now, across the street Steven lived. I watched the little boy grow
up. As he grew up, Nancy and Robert yelled and abused him whenever
he did anything wrong.

I felt sorry for him. I remembered the meat my friend gave to me.
The meats were tasty. A young boy or girl should be an excellent
source of protein and meat. Could I lure and eat Steven? I knew
his health was good. He was muscular and now he was seven years
old. His bones carried some good flesh. I decided to get him and
eat him. My friend made it seem so easy.

My house sits on a curve and there are no houses in my view from

my front porch. Behind my house are thick woods and swiftly moving
river, a perfect place for a crime.

I watched little Steven learning how to ride his bicycle. He rode

wobbly up and down the street, careening haphazardly in the way of
speeding teenagers and ancient little old lady drivers. One day I
closed my eyes in horror as a speeding car careened off the road
trying to miss the wobbling boy bike rider.
The curve I lived on is a blind curve where oncoming cars cannot
see each other, a dangerous piece of road. Therefore, it was on a
cool spring day when Steven pedaled toward my house, weaving,
wobbly. I was sitting on the porch eating popcorn and drinking a
beer. The two do not go together, but that was what I was eating--
out of boredom and having writer's block. I was sitting like a
spider waiting for some passing food. Steven wobbled up to the
curb in front of me.

"Hello, Steven," I called. "Where are you going on your bicycle?"

I asked, trying to be friendly.

"Mister Bruce!" He called. "I can ride my bike now with no hands."

"Really," I answered.

"Wanna see?"

"Sure. Show me. Ride on my driveway. It's safer than on the road."

Steven started pedaling into my driveway. He lifted both of his

hands and kept pedaling right into the backyard. Following, I met
him as he tried turning but slipped, his bike sliding one
direction, and Steven sliding in the other direction.

I picked up the boy and carried him into my house. Sitting him
down on a kitchen chain I said, "Let me take a look at you to see
if you're ok."

"But Mister Bruce, I feel ok," he said swinging his legs back and
forth.

"Well, little man, you look alright to me, too. Want some candy? I
have some left over from Halloween."

His eyes brightened with a wide smile, "Candy? Sure!"

I handed him a bowl and popped the lid for him. His eyes got wide
as he beheld my vast stash of sweetness. "Take all you want." I
handed him some soda, spiked with alcohol to make him quickly
drunk. He took the candy and soda and sat back in the chair to
chat with me.

As we talked, he got giddier and giddier. His head bobbed. Steven

got drunker and drunker. About a half an hour into our talk, he
fell forward onto the hard kitchen floor.

I stood up and looked down at Steven. He was mine. Mine for food.
I had planned this and here he was. My very own seven year old
human who I was going to kill and eat like a common animal. I
picked him up and carried the boy down into the basement.

During the winter, I planned my crime. I had outfitted the

basement with the necessary tools to butcher the boy. There was a
table, a sink, sharp hooks suspended from the floor joists. There
were several buckets for temporarily storing guts and other messy
parts during the initial carving of the boy's carcass.

I laid Steven's limp body on the table. First, I pulled off his
pants and underpants. Remembering my hands gripping his chubby
baby legs seven years ago, now they were muscular, just right for
a young boy. I'm not gay, but my fingers explored his miniature
sexual equipment. Then I pulled his shirt off. His clothes went
into a plastic garbage bag. I raised his arms above his head and
my hands explored his tender upper body.

"Perfect small meat animal," I said. He was like a small deer

weighing sixty pounds. He would yield about twenty-five pounds of
luscious, soft meat.

As I pierced his ankles with the meat hooks, he awoke from his
drunken slumber, "Yyeeooowww!" He yelled. Blood squirted out of
the puncture wounds. I quickly hoisted my young animal upside
down. Now he was wiggling and crying, blood streaming down his
white skin. Picking up an old baseball bat that I had picked up at
a garage sale, I whacked him in the back of his head as hard as I
could swing. There was a rush of air from his lungs, a quick
deathly gasp. His body jerked, quivered and then he hung upside
down limply, quietly. Blood tricked from his mouth and from his
ankles.

I slid a bucket under him, put my knee against his back, and
sliced his skinny neck. With one slice, the knife went clear to
the bone. With a little working of the knife, I removed his head.
Blood gushed out of the veins in his neck. I was bloody. His head
was bloody. The bucket filled with bubbly blood. I squeezed his
limbs and pumped his stomach working more blood out of the
carcass.

Gutting was fairly easy, though it was quite messy. My prize for
gutting was a pound and a half of beautiful liver and a very tasty
heart.

The carcass was skinned. The more skin I peeled, the hungrier I
became. I could see the fresh pink meat that packed in around his
white bones. When I was through with skinning, I sawed the body
into two sides. I stepped back and took in my creation. Once there
was a boy running around on two feet. Now, the same boy had been
turned into a meat carcass was split into two, and hanging by his
feet. The feel of the meat was soft like when Steven careened
around on his bicycle. All that I needed to do was to let the
sides hang for several days to properly age.

I tossed his bicycle down the riverbank. When the cops came, and
they did come, they would see that Steven had ridden too close the
dangerous river. I reflected on the boy. When he was alive, Steven
needed all of the fleshy stuff that I had cut away from him, stuff
that wasn't edible I considered garbage. I tossed his whole head,
something he absolutely needed to be alive.

It was fun carving his legs into steaks, his calves into strips of
meat. I ate his forearms as one would eat a turkey drumstick. I
made ground meat for hamburger from his upper arms. His ass cheeks
were carved carefully, yielding tasty steaks. I had enough ribs to
last a month of weekend barbecuing. Steven's meat was very soft,
very tender, and very tasty.

His parents, although they missed him for a while, have admitted
that his presence had strained their marriage, vowing never to
have another child again. The last time I visited them, I rubbed
my stomach and said, "I remember that Steven was a good boy."

The End