Free Wild Things: Four Tales by Douglas Clegg

said, trying to keep my mind from thinking about Gup and the Axeman too much, and forcing myself to keep out of playing the Dark Game. To remain in the moment.

    “Have you ever tasted human flesh?” Hoax asked.
    I didn’t answer. I looked at poor Gup’s face. I wished him to die right there. I prayed to God. I prayed to the Devil. I prayed to the Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Mother of God, Blessed is the Fruit of her Womb, Jesus.
    I prayed that his spirit would be pulled from his body before another night passed.
    This entertainment of Hoax’s went on for several nights, but each time I refused to answer his questions. I will admit with nothing but shame that I began to crave the meals brought to me, and I convinced myself – no doubt for survival’s sake – that this was not the body of Gup that I slowly consumed,
    sliced from him day after day and cooked up with spices and aromatic flowers to make dishes that I began to love.
    This was simply meat that had been taken from the body of pigs and rats and snakes and lizards and frogs and fish and other creatures of this Enemy’s country.
    This was not Gup’s foot, sliced into slivers, swimming in fragrant soup.
    This was not a bit of flayed skin from Gup’s buttocks, wrapped within a palm front that had been buttered and baked into a moist but crunchy crust.
    Yet, nightly, Gup was there, soon an eye was gone, then his nose, his ears, toes and left foot, his lips sliced off, until I saw him no longer as a man at all, as a friend, as a former buddy, as one of the team.
    I saw him as the supplier of my life.
    In a dream, in the hole, I saw the great snake of life, devouring its own tail. Life eats life, the image of the snake seemed to tell me. Life devours itself. You are part of this, and so is Gup. The snake is the whip in my father’s hand. The whip is in my hand and reaches from my bloodied back to whip my father’s hand. The torturer and the tortured are each playing a part and cannot be without the other.
    So, I awoke from this dream and knew then that life was neither beautiful nor perfect nor magical.
    Life was simply the gutter of heaven, the place where offal and waste was spilled.
    I began to love my suppers with Hoax. Even when the Axeman came to me, a razor in his hand, and my mind shooting off to the game, I began to enjoy my contact with these cosmic barbarians and I looked forward to whatever they had in store. I had forgotten my army, my country, and my friends. There was only my hole and my cell, and my smokehouse back on Burnley Island. It was the whole universe, and I could not tell whether it was heaven or hell.
    Then, coming from the Dark Game, out into the cell again, it was pain in my crotch that had me screaming, yet I felt distant from the scream. I felt I could measure the scream and how it flew along the cell walls, bouncing up and down and back again.
    They took another one of my fingers, but worse, one of my nuts was felled that night.
    The Axeman had done it, with his little razor.
    I hadn’t answered the questions, and they had taken my left ball after slicing off my next finger down from my already-torn-off pinkie.
    When I came around, I was in the cell, screaming, and one of my guys -- Larry Pastor -- sat across from me, watching, his face trembling as if with an impending storm of sobs.
    I had become the new entertainment for someone else now.
    I was the star of the show.
    The next night, I had the best supper yet, with Larry staring at me from across the room, his face a grimace.
    What was I eating? My finger? My testicle? Or simply some specially-sliced rat over a bed of eel-leaves?
    “It’s all right,” I told him. “It tastes good. It really does.”
    13
    I was unsure of what I ate most nights, but the strangest thing of all was that I had begun gaining weight. I still drank a bit of the opium water – Hoax would bring in barely a thimbleful. I guess he wanted to keep me pliable and still sober enough when necessary.
    I