His name was Oliver, and everything about him reminded Jenni of a bird. He was slim-necked, pointy nosed, and had a sing-song way of speaking that betrayed his nervousness instead of hiding it. His head bobbed from side to side in a manner not caused by the swaying of the bus, and he shifted in his seat as he blurted out an offer of dinner.
Jenni feigned surprise, forced out a giggle, and demurely accepted. She had seen this Oliver every day, seen the way he stared at her- with unashamed, carnivorous hunger.
He seemed perfect.
So it came as a great surprise to her when, at dinner, the salivating Oliver revealed himself to be a vegetarian.
Jenni almost dropped her wine glass. “A what?”
Oliver blinked behind his spectacles. “A vegetarian. I don’t eat meat.”
She found it hard to keep her composure. “Why on earth not?” she demanded.
Oliver took a deep breath, which puffed out his pigeon chest beneath his awfully ethnic linen shirt.
“Eating meat is not only cruel and unnecessary, but it also poses long term health risks. The animals are kept in cramped conditions which spread disease; they’re fed dozens of types of antibiotics just to stay alive long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse…”
He stopped as the waiter came to take their order.
“I’ll have a spinach lasagne,” said Oliver. “There isn’t any rennet in the cheese, is there?”
Jenni didn’t even look at the menu. “Steak,” she told the waiter. “As rare as possible. No sauce.”
She tried to ignore Oliver’s screwed up face. Her glass was refilled, and she drained it quickly.
The steak was too well done, and Oliver ruined it anyway with his herbivorous prattle as he picked at his side salad. Did Jenni know that you could get tapeworm and E-Coli from undercooked beef? Or that the cow that became her steak was herded onto the filthy kill floor of an abattoir where it had its brain smashed in with a steel bolt? Or that CJD can lurk in the body for decades before it creeps up your spine to cause madness and death?
What on earth did Oliver know about madness or death, Jenni wondered.
They split the bill equally, because Oliver refused to “fund the machinations of murder.” This was all getting very tiresome.
He asked her if she’d like to come back to his place for coffee. Jenni thought about the packet of ground beef in her refrigerator. A minute in the microwave and it would be just about body temperature, and nothing sets off a glass of merlot quite like a plate of raw pink meat, ground up so tender like someone had already chewed it for her. The Naked Lunch was on TV as well. She shook her head.
“Well, what about your place?” he chirped, and he looked so eager that Jenni knew it would be impossible to turn him down. She always was such a softie.
It was in the back of the taxi, in between slobbery kisses and inept fumblings, that Oliver finally mumbled The Dreaded Question.
“So… what did you say you did again?”
It was at dinner a few days later that Jenni said to Richard, “I’ve found someone.”
It was a wonderful spread. An array of delicacies- flesh, fish and fowl, both raw and cooked, arranged on the most beautiful platter imaginable- Jenni’s own naked body. She lay in the centre of Richard’s bed, feeling the blood from the raw sirloin covering her pudenda and her own pungent juices running down and staining the expensive cotton sheets. But Richard never minded the mess. He too, was naked, and helping himself to a piece of sushi that had until recently been atop her right nipple.
“Oh really?” he said, pausing to dip his California roll into the pool of soy sauce in her belly button. “What’s he like?”
“Utterly intolerable. I can’t stand him. Plus, he fucks like he’s fifteen.”
“Oh dear, well you won’t have to put up with him that much longer. Lamb chop?”
He picked one up from her stomach and lowered it into her mouth.
“He’s a vegetarian, Richard!” she complained between mouthfuls. “All he does is moan about what I’m eating and try to feed me quiche!”
“Ssh!” soothed Richard. “Give the quiche a chance, my chitterling. And just remember- vegetarians always taste better.”
“What do you think he’ll be like, Richard?” she asked, her eyes shining. “Do you think he’ll be like pork or venison?”
“Now, that is a puzzler,” he replied, and he gave a gentle tug at the huge bratwurst secreted in Jenni’s cunt, making her moan.
“The cannibal tribes of Papa New Guinea called human flesh ‘long pig’- suggesting a porky flavour. But I’d rather like to think,” he said, as he gave a deep sniff of the sausage and bit off the end, “that your little vegetarian will taste as dark and rich as the finest game.”
He leaned in to kiss her, and stuck the sausage back inside.
“When can we do it?” whispered Jenni, as Richard climbed on top of her, sending vol-au-vents skittering across the mattress.
“Soon,” he muttered, move his lips over her skin, lapping up the juices of their supper as he used the bratwurst to fuck her. “Soon, my sweet.”
“Oh Richard!” she moaned, thrusting her hips upwards, beginning to come as he moved the sausage faster and harder. As soon as she came, he pulled it out with a shluck sound of trapped air, gobbled it up ravenously, and then hastily replaced it with his penis. Jenni writhed beneath him, coming again and again as the head of his giant cock banged at her cervix like a battering ram.
Despite their gyrations, the huge slab of sirloin was still glistening on top of her pussy. When Richard finally came, he pulled out and shot thick, ropey gouts of semen all over the meat, and then sat back, breathing heavily, as he watched Jenni fall upon it like a starving dog, licking the sperm up off the surface before worrying with their teeth.
They fell asleep in a tight embrace, as all around them, their ruined feast oozed and spoiled.
Richard and Jenni first met through her job, but it was their mutual love of offal that brought them together. Jenni was used to slick, well-heeled gentlemen in the speciality butcher’s, but in her meat connoisseur’s eyes, they were wimps, buying gammon joints and legs of lamb for their Sunday dinners. At first, Richard’s face blended in with all the others, until she noticed the extravagant amount of unusual purchases he made- pounds and pounds of tripe and kidneys, dozens of trotters and hearts. As she handed over these heaving packets to him, wrapped in greased paper with blood pooling at the bottom, Jenni looked into his clever green eyes, and realised she’d finally found a soul-mate.
Richard was similarly entranced. He had watched Jenni for many months and the loving way in which she handled the meat set her out from the rest of the grim faced staff behind the counter, who every night rushed home to wash the stench of death out from beneath their fingernails. It intrigued him, how she made sausages, and that wistful way in which she sliced through a huge slab of topside. She interested him so much that one day, just as she was handing over twelve pounds of ribs and a bag of oxtail, he asked her whether she’d like to go to see an exhibition with him.
She said yes, and the next afternoon found herself standing, speechless with awe, beneath a gigantic oil painting depicting a screaming man seated between two suspended sides of beef. The exhibition was a retrospective on Francis Bacon (even his name was meat related!) and, as it turned out, Richard was an art dealer and was filthy, stinking rich. Jenni, on the other hand, knew nothing about art. But she knew what she liked.
“What do you think?” whispered Richard, coming up behind her silently as she stared, slack-jawed, at the majesty that was Figure With Meat.
“I love it,” she breathed, feeling his hands, strong and perfect for strangling, work their way round her waist, kneading her belly as if testing it for ripeness.
“I want to be it.”
An hour and a half later, and she was stripped naked and hanging from a meat hook in Richard’s walk-in freezer, screaming in ecstasy as he gave her head between two sides of beef.
The subject of cannibalism came up naturally in conversation, as you would expect from two such slavering meat-fiends. For a while, the idea of eating a child consumed them, because the meat would be as tender and tasty as Kobe beef. But in the end they decided against trying to procure one, as missing children inevitably cause panic and immediate investigation by the police. They agreed that it would be much easier to trick and subdue an adult with the minimum of fuss than to snatch a child from the nearest playground. An adult would come of his own free will, if there was the right sort of bait to tempt him.
Jenni immediately thought of the young, bespectacled man on the bus, and his longing gaze.
As it turned out, Oliver considered himself an artist. The bland little pencil sketches he showed her were nothing on the gory sweeps and visceral colours of Bacon’s work, but Jenni delighted in them anyway, because they had provided her with a carrot to dangle before him. She cooed enthusiastically at the renderings of streams and mountains, and salivated at the thought of a mist of blood, and the hot, pulpy stink of freshly exposed organs.
“Do you really like them?” asked Oliver.
“Of course I like them!” Jenni exclaimed. “They’re wonderful! Where did you say you drew these again?”
“Nepal, when I was travelling a few years ago.”
Jenni smiled over the top of the sketch pad. “I have a good friend that would probably like them too. You should meet him.”
“Really, who?” he asked, and Jenni smugly detected a note of jealousy in his sing-song voice.
“His name is Richard, and you will get on like a house on fire, I’m sure of it. You should come to his place for dinner.”
Oliver looked sceptical. “I don’t know, Jen…”
“He’s an art dealer.”
“Just name a night and I’ll be there!” he said hastily.
Jenni smiled again. Hook, line and sinker.
One week later, Oliver and Jenni took a taxi to Richard’s house, both of them fidgeting nervously, though for many different reasons. Jenni found herself glancing over at the vegetarian, at his downy, fluffy hair and his slim, fine boned fingers, and wondered if she could really go through with it and slaughter the boy like cattle. Then she noticed the PETA flyer stuffed in his pocket, the ugly non-leather boots, and the little ‘Go Veggie!’ badge pinned to his lapel, and all sympathy flew from her like a flock of starlings disturbed by a cat. If meat is murder, she thought, then murder must be meat.
Oliver gasped at the Bentley in the drive, at the huge sweeping staircases, and at the taxidermy on the walls. He curiously kept his mouth shut about the latter, though, when he met Richard, who was resplendent in Gucci, a stark contrast to the hemp and tie-dyed denim that made up Oliver’s entire wardrobe. He was probably anxious to make a friend of the rich, influential art dealer, Jenni thought, scornfully. How little his righteous morals seemed to matter when there was something to gain. What a phoney this skinny runt was, shaking hands with a man he would curse and throw paint on if he was surrounded by other right-on patchouli halfwits at a fashion show protest. Ten minutes ago, Jenni was unsure about killing him. Now she was relishing it.
For dinner, Richard had arranged a light buffet of fruit, nuts, and salad, and made a big show of admiring Oliver’s naïvely put together portfolio. As he waffled on about Nepal and the artistic stimulation he had gained from its tranquil villages and lush valleys, Richard nodded in affable agreement and poured him a large glass of Chianti.
Oliver frowned. He preferred white wine and noticed that both Jenni and Richard were favouring Chardonnay, but he didn’t want to appear rude as this Richard guy had mentioned the possibility of an exhibition. Plus, he seemed a lot more forgiving of vegetarianism than Jenni- the stuffed olives were heavenly!
He tucked into the tapas, blissfully unaware that the reason the others were avoiding the red was because it contained enough Rohypnol to subdue a buffalo.
The next thing Oliver was aware of was that he was being dragged along a cool, tiled floor on his back. He could hear low voices muttering, whispering softly… Jenni? Yes she was there, but what was going on, where was he? He remembered the warming, yet strangely bitter flavour of the wine, and the salty deliciousness of the olives, and then nothing.
A cold breeze on his bare nipples startled him almost fully awake, and he became sickeningly aware that he was upside down and swinging slowly to and fro, naked. He opened his eyes but everything was blurry- his glasses were gone. Fear made the gooseflesh on his scrotum rise and he felt his stomach lurch. There were figures moving before him and he could hear Jenni’s voice again, but the only thing he could see clearly was a plastic bucket, placed right beneath his head.
“I want to eat his balls first.”
“While he’s still alive?”
“Yes.”
“You cruel bitch,” smirked Richard, and he felt his dick grow large and hard despite the chilly air in the garage.
Jenni stood before the suspended Oliver, magnificently nude and shaking with anticipation. One of her hands held tight a butcher’s knife, which Richard had sharpened that afternoon for the occasion. As the boy’s eyes blinked open and recognised her face, Jenni allowed him a smile.
“J-Jenni?” he moaned,
One last, achingly sweet smile, before she grabbed his genitals and severed them with a quick flick of the knife.
Oliver didn’t even feel the cut, thanks to shock, but as the hot blood coursed down his body and into the bucket, he screamed. All rhyme and reason had left him, his mind falling into the narrow, constricted tunnel of blinding terror that all prey feel at the touch of a predator’s teeth. The blood was streaming slick and fast, so much blood, getting in his mouth as it flowed down him into the bucket.
One scream was all he got. Jenni cut straight through his vocal cords with one more sweep of the knife, then watched him bleed to death as she sucked the oyster-like testicles from the coarse scrotal sac.
Richard left the butchering to Jenni- much as he had been itching to kill the boy himself, Jenni’s expertise and skill with a carcass would ensure that every little bit of Oliver was saved for eating. It might have been fun, to cut him up, Richard mused, but in his hands there would likely be nothing left but a sticky smear. He went to prepare the kitchen for the feast.
That night the couple fried slices of dark, fragrant meat in a little butter on a skillet. They had already eaten his eyeballs and brains raw, and drank a healthy goblet of blood each before it cooled, but now it was time to sample some of the really good stuff. It smelt fantastic.
As Oliver’s flesh melted delicately over her tongue, she thought of the curved cheek and the arch of his back, the pink shell of his ears, the poetry and melody of his voice. In death, she was able to love him, and as she chewed that musky, spicy meat she wept, appreciating that despite their like-minded nature, it had been Oliver, and not Richard, that had given her the satisfaction she so badly needed.
But what would happen once all of Oliver was gone, she anxiously wondered. Would she go back to her chitterlings and pig’s feet? The thought of never again knowing a boy this thoroughly, to consume him and feel his flesh become hers, to have to be content with stupid beasts of the field capable of nothing but dying, filled her with such nausea that she nearly regurgitated part of her recently deceased lover. She could not condemn herself to purgatory. She looked at Richard, her eyes roaming over his sweaty haunches and firm buttocks. He could not and would not weep for the boy, whose head was now boiling in a cauldron on the hob. He was merely an epicure and a collector of sensations, searching for some sort of pleasure to move him. He never saw the look in Jenni’s eye as she crouched naked over their meal, or her hand reach once more for the bloody butcher’s knife.
