Congratulations Finicky Eating Soldier!

After the Second Great War ended, you spent thirty years waiting on an island for news of a glorious Imperial victory, but it never came.  You were never told that you should return to your home village and take a wife, or that you could perhaps return home and take up a mediocre, tedious trade such as fishmongering in order to eke out a living in a state that, while you were willing to die for it, had little real need for you beyond that.  You just waited and waited.

At first there was an entire battalion of you there, patiently awaiting some sort of order.  You had supplies enough to last a decade, augmented by animals you could catch from the island.  But the animals died off faster than anticipated, and the supplies ran thin after a handful of fat soldiers decided to step up their rations against the will of the commander.  These soldiers were executed, then fed to the men they had stolen food from.

This led to a three decade long conflict wherein various factions hunted down and murdered their fellow soldiers before eating them.  You survived mostly by keeping your head down and following whoever seemed to be the best at killing at any given moment, and when the smoke cleared and you were relatively certain you were only one of a handful of survivors left on the island, you murdered your last ally with a rock, took his head to display your dominance, and assembled the remaining desperate men together under your leadership to build a raft and return home, orders be damned.

Along the way, you ate two more men and a bunch of sea turtles, which you developed quite a taste for.  But once you returned home, you had a problem: society didn’t really have a place for an aging, desperate collective of murders, and you also didn’t really like food that wasn’t human flesh or turtle meat.

It was manageable for a while.  Lax regulations meant you could get away with eating endangered turtles up until the late nineties, and a sexist and corrupt Japanese legal system meant women could occasionally “disappear” without too much trouble.

But now you’ve grown old, and twilight approaches.  You await the grim specter of death and, as you do so, you long for one more satisfying meal.  So today your grand niece will approach you and, after hearing you request human flesh for the fiftieth god damn time, cut off both your hands in a fit of rage and feed them to you.

Your hands, your calloused, sea soaked hands that have seen so much blood and done so much harm, will have been seasoned by their actions until they taste amazing.  Like, really, really good.  Impressively good.  They’ll be the best hands you’ve ever eaten, and you’ve eaten quite a few.

You’ll thank your niece for her ingenuity, then die with a series of extravagant gasps.  It’ll be kind of dramatic but your niece, who didn’t much care for you, won’t be impressed.  She’ll just be kind of bummed about having to dispose of your body alone, since all your other relatives will have long since abandoned you, thanks mostly to your constant rants about how amazing people taste.

Congratulations Finicky Eating Soldier!

Congratulations on Feigning Death to Avoid Helping Your Mom Go Get Groceries!

When you hear the first footstep on the first stair you’ll know, just by the creak of her weight and the moan of the wood that it won’t be enough to just say you’d rather not go to the grocery store. You know that pretending to be asleep won’t be enough to keep your mom off your back either. Hell, even telling her in a totally reasonable tone of voice that “fifteen is too old for a young woman to accompany her mother to the grocery store” probably wouldn’t get her to leave you alone.

So here’s what you’re gonna do.

By the time your mother hits the second step you’ll have the toy gun and the M-80 you stole from your little brother out. By the time her foot hits the third step you’ll have the M-80 lit and sitting on your desk, underneath one of the cleaner bowls you’ve brought up to your room so you can eat dinner alone over the last week. By the time her foot hits the fourth step you’ll have all that stage blood you swiped from the drama department out and you’ll be smearing it on yourself and by the fifth step you’ll be just covered in it. By the sixth step you’ll have laid yourself out on the floor next to a nice big pool of fake blood and after the seventh step you won’t have to count her steps no more: you’ll be still and the toy-gun will be a little bit away from your hand on the floor, splayed out.

When the M-80 goes off the steps will hasten and by the time they reach your room they’ll be more like a gallop.

Your mother will crack the door and gasp, then fall to your side weeping. You’ll stay still, as best you can, never moving, not even breathing. You won’t want to make this into a thing. You’ll just want to stay at home instead of watching your mom avoid thinking about how much she hates your dad by choosing between nearly identical brands of popsicles with you in tow.

Sure, when the police come and discover that you are, in fact, totally alive, she’ll be upset. But then you’ll have some other people there to help you out and witness, along with you, just how crazy your bitch of a mom is. And that’s worth the hassle of faking your own death, I think we can all agree.

Congratulations on Feigning Death to Avoid Helping Your Mom Go Get Groceries!

Congratulations on Carving Up the Only Sentient Cooked Turkey in the World!

You know how sometimes you get so hungry that people just turn into the shape of a piece of food? Like when you’re on a desert island and someone changes shape into a steak or a chicken leg and you attack them and, moments before committing the permanent act, you snap out of it and realize that you’re actually about to stab a person? It happens to you a lot, so often your family has grown accustomed to screaming “I’m not a sentient piece of food” when you get a certain look in your eye in order to avoid embarrassing Greek Easters or Fourth of July Picnics.

But today, in what you all like to call “February Thanksgiving,” the holiday your family invented so you could be moderately less offensive to the American Indians who were murdered by your forefathers, you’re going to encounter a real live talking turkey.

“Hey!” the turkey will stand up and shout. “Hey! Hey!”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” your family will shout. They’ll all stand up from the table and back away until they’re ass to wall, staring at the turkey, waiting for something, anything, new to go wrong.

“I got this,” you’ll tell them, gesturing vaguely at the room surrounding you.

“Oh thank god,” the turkey will exclaim, standing up on its weird turkey legs and gesturing with its wings. “My name is Saul Kinsley and I’ve inhabited the body of this turk-“

You’ll cut off his life’s story with a serrated knife, digging it into his stomach and ripping it across, spilling his stuffing across the table.

“Oh god, oh god,” he’ll murmur, struggling to collect his stuffing in his tiny, worthless wings. “Please don-“

You’ll cut him again and again and again, taking limb from limb until he is totally dismembered. He’ll be screaming the entire time, despite his lack of a mouth. You won’t really know when he stops crying out. You won’t know if he just lost strength or if whatever eldritch power that drove that turkey to scream has been driven out by your reaving efforts.

All you’ll know is that when your family sits down and digs into the scattered corpse of the once-talking turkey it’ll be the best they’ve ever tasted. It’ll be so tasty that no one will argue. You’ll all just sit and eat. It’ll be one of the best February Thanksgivings ever.

Congratulations on Carving Up the Only Sentient Cooked Turkey in the World!