Yums Yums

IT WASN’T EASY EATING a human head.

Bone crunching. Brain squishing. He managed though.

Of course, he didn’t start out with that level of skill. He had to work up to it.

***

John Riley was born with a vicious appetite. From day one, his aptitude for consumption shocked his unsuspecting parents.

Here’s the secret. What they didn’t know about John.

Aside from the regular boring meals at home. The fried chicken. The meat loafs. Pork chops with taters and healthy veggies.

Booooooring.

Deep down, John craved something more.

The first chance he got, John ate a live bird. He had this uncanny ability to stretch his jaw as a snake would and was able to swallow anything. He didn’t know this wasn’t normal. He had no clue he was the only one able to do it.

He was with his friend, Charlie Mitchell, who lived down the street. They were playing by the creek when Johnny snatched a bird.

“I’m hungry,” he said. It wasn’t a small bird, either. In his stubby fingers, he held a crow. Knowing it was in the grips of a predator, the creature squawked and pecked at John’s hands. Undaunted, John opened his mouth and shoved the bird in.

Blood oozed down the corners of his lips and narrow rivulets dripped down his chin as he chewed vigorously.

John was smiling as he looked at Charlie.

“What did you do that for?” Charlie asked. He covered his ears to block out the screeching death throes of the animal trapped in his friend’s mouth.

John chewed. The chirping stopped and he swallowed. “Cause it’s yums yums.”

“So, you ate a bird? That’s cool.”

“You want to try?”

“Naaa. My mom’ll kill me if I did that.”

“Okay but if you get hungry let me know.”

“I want to see you eat something else.”

“Okay. I can go for some more yums yums.”

“You’re always hungry. You eat more than my grandpa and he’s fat.” Charlie looked around the water’s edge and saw a snake. He pointed. “Eat that.”

“That’s easy.”

“May be a rattlesnake.”

John studied the serpent’s body. “Nope. That’s just a water snake.” He snatched it up by its tail. Wriggling in his hand as he held it high over his head, the snake was around six feet long. Taller than John. He opened his mouth and guided the snake in, headfirst. John’s throat muscles twisted and jolted. His Adam’s apple rose and fell in short rapid successions as he swallowed the snake inch by inch.

“Woah dude. That is so cool.”

John’s stomach twitched and wiggled.

“Woah. I can see the snake moving in your belly.”

Inch by inch John continued to eat the snake until it was all gone.

“Does your mom and dad know you can do this?”

“Never told them.”

Charlie jumped up and down with excitement. “This is so cool. Eat something else.”

“Naaa. I need to go home. It’s almost time for supper.”

“Dude. You just ate.”

“Mom’s making fried chicken. That other stuff was just for fun.”

While Charlie wasn’t looking, John swiped the watch off Charlie’s wrist and swallowed it.

***

“Just hung out with Charlie.”

“Oh, that boy,” she said, her mouth pressing into a flat line. “You know he’s a bad influence. I don’t want you spending so much time with him. You hear me?”

John shrugged. “He’s okay. A little boring sometimes.”

John’s dad grinned and pointed his fork across the table at his son. “Charlie is trouble. Listen to your mother.”

“I will, Dad.”

“That’s a boy. What is that ticking sound?”

John patted his stomach as he grabbed a chicken leg and downed half of it in one bite.

“That’s probably the clock,” his mom said.

“I’m hungry,” Johnny said, swallowing the rest of the chicken leg, bone and all.

His father chuckled. “Of course, you are. You’re a growing boy. Honey, get my growing boy more chicken.”

***

The next day after school Charlie brought a couple of friends over.

“They want to see you eat something,” he said.

“Yeah, we do,” they said in unison.

“Like what?”

“Anything,” a little girl replied. She held out her hand. A necklace dangled from her fingers. “It’s my mom’s. A real diamond. How about this?”

Johnny shrugged, grabbed the necklace, opened wide, and swallowed.

“That is so cool,” the girl said. “My mother will be looking for it forever. She’ll never find it.”

“I have something,” a boy said. Johnny recognized him from history class. The kid reached into his pocket and took out a small square box. “These are my grandfather’s teeth. He’s always picking on me, so I took them off the kitchen sink while he was sleeping.”

Johnny took the dentures. Yellow-stained. Still little bits of food, what looked like chicken or steak, stuck between a couple of them. They smelled like rotten eggs.

He swallowed them in one gulp.

“That is soooo gross but so cool,” the boy said.

“Are you still hungry?” another girl asked.

“I can always eat. Don’t have to be hungry to eat.”

“I want to see him eat something else,” another said.

“Me too.”

“I know what he can eat next,” the girl said. “Follow me.”

“Where we going?” Charlie asked.

“You’ll see. I bet he won’t eat this,” she said with a know-it-all smirk.

“I bet he will,” Charlie rejoined. “There ain’t nothing Johnny can’t eat.”

She grinned and it was easy to see she had something devilish planned. Something weird and maybe a little scary.

“There.” She pointed at a doghouse and a large, black barking German shepherd.

“Seriously?” Charlie asked. “You want him to eat a dog?”

“You said he can eat anything. Let’s see it.”

“But a dog?”

“Yeah, we want to see him eat the dog,” said grandpa-teeth. The others nodded in assent.

The chain jerked as the dog, wary of his uninvited visitors, tried to tear free.

“That dog is dangerous,” necklace-girl said. “He hates everybody. My parents warned me not to go near that fence on account of him attacking a kid once. Very mean.”

“That should make it more exciting then,” said know-it-all.

Yes, the dog was mean. Ferocious, even. But Johnny especially didn’t like that know-it-all girl. She was always trying to make a fool of him in math class, always acting like she’s smarter than everybody else because her dad was some kind of lawyer.

Johnny gazed at the barking dog, salivating heavily. He began to taste the metallic ting. Feeling the flesh between his teeth, tearing through sinew and bone. He imagined the dog tasting like candy going down his throat.

What would normally make a lot of kids and parents sick never bothered Johnny.

He even liked the thought of the fur, covering his tongue.

Johnny approached the snarling shepherd. Staring. His hands in fists. The dog growled and gnashed. Nobody in their right state of mind would go near the creature.

The dog that was known to tear people apart.

“You better do it before his person gets home,” the girl said. “It’s almost five.”

Johnny tried putting her voice out of his mind. He walked up to the dog. Grabbed it by its neck and gave it a quick snap.

The shepherd fell limp in his hands.

A cacophony of oooohs and aaaahhhhs arose from the other four.

Johnny’s jaw stretched, and he tore into the dog’s neck.

Chomping.

Tearing away large chunks at a time and swallowing them.

Blood oozing from around his hands and pooling at his feet. He chewed into the neck through the gristle, through the bone. His face going deeper and deeper into the flesh until the shepherd’s head dropped off.

Johnny held the dripping head high for the group, then brought the dog’s face to his mouth and gnawed, nose first, then the eyes, and finally chomping into the skull as if he were eating a large apple.

“Ohhhh, this is sooooo gross,” necklace-girl said.

“I’m not liking this,” said grandpa-teeth.

Even Charlie appeared shocked.

Johnny tossed away the remainder of the skull and snapped off one of the dog’s legs, eating it as easily as he did the chicken leg at dinner the night before.

He snapped off another and then another.

He ate until there was nothing left but a carcass with stray chunks of dangling flesh.

By the time Johnny finished, he was covered with blood, with clumps of fur stuck to his arms, legs, and mouth.

He let out with a huge belch.

Their party was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up the drive, and they ran back into the woods.

That evening the dog’s owner put up a post. He said a coyote must’ve gotten to Bruce and warned all the neighbors to take their dogs in and never leave them chained outside. In a P.S., the man expressed his surprise that a coyote was able to get the best of Bruce, with how vicious and mean Bruce was. Johnny never knew the dog’s name before, but decided the temperamental canine indeed seemed like a Bruce, and that made eating him all the more satisfying.

“Dude,” Charlie said the next day at school. “That was awesome. I never thought you would be able to eat that dog.”

“I can eat anything,” Johnny said.

“What’s it tastes like?”

“Chicken.”

“Ohhhh man. Everything tastes like chicken.”

“Well, it also has a wild animal taste to it. But if I had to say, I’d say it tastes like chicken.”

***

As time went on and Johnny approached his teen years, he had eaten a lot of things.

He often had to sneak out of the house at night to enjoy some of the earth’s fine delicacies.

He ate the neighbor’s cat. Stray cats. Pet cats. It didn’t matter. If it was around and he managed to snatch it, down the hatch it went.

Lickety-split.

YUMS YUMS.

When he was in the mood for a special treat, he would take a walk along Troy Avenue, where he usually found a dead raccoon or squirrel at the side of the road. The scent of the roadkill was like a fine cut of filet mignon.

As time went on and as he got a little older, he grew too big to be called Johnny and wanted to be called John.

He also outgrew the roadkill and small animals. Those were snacks.

He longed for more.

He needed more.

Something more substantial.

Satisfying.

He needed different YUMS YUMS.

Yet he didn’t quite know what he needed. Until he saw it.

Plain as day.

Yes.

He was walking down the street looking for something odd to satiate his hunger when he saw it.

He didn’t know the family. They lived a couple blocks over and had just moved in a few months ago.

A father got out of the car, his hair graying around the temples, followed by a mother and a young woman—their daughter, he guessed. She cradled a baby in her arms.

He turned his nose into the air and sniffed. The aroma was heavenly. Like a freshly baked cake right out of the oven.

Soft. Spongy.

Oily.

The baby’s crying was music to his ears.

The family was all smiles.

John salivated. Stomach rumbled. His heartbeat quickened.

He charged after the family. All eyes on the infant. A must-have. With the speed of a pit bull, John leapt at the tot, snatching it from its mother’s arms.

She screamed as she fought him.

The child’s grandfather punched at John, but his frail, thin body was no match for John’s size.

John held the baby high by its feet.

Jaw stretched open wide, he held the crying infant over his salivating mouth.

Then paused.

He was so used to gobbling, snarfing, gulping down the delectable morsels of his truest obsessions. But this time, he felt the urge to suspend the moment, take it all in, savor the anticipation. The wailing baby and the pleading mother. The crying of the new grandfather. The begging of the new grandmother. The musk of their familial terror. A delicious dissonance of sounds and smells, like when you walk into the kitchen as the meal is being prepared.

A meal made with love.

He sniffed the baby. Licking it to tenderize the meat.

The flesh must be purified.

He continued licking the infant. Cleansing it of the oils and lotions applied at the hospital.

When he felt it was ready, just right, John cradled the baby’s head in his large, calloused hands and squeezed. Brains oozed between his hairy fingers like the pulp of an orange.

Skull crackling. Bones snapping.

A mix of blood and brains burst from the baby’s ears and mouth. Eyes popped out and landed on the ground.

John compressed the tiny head between his massive palms while the family sobbed and whimpered and screamed in the background. Except the baby, which cried no more.

He relished the ambient noise of their suffering, like violin music in a fancy restaurant. It didn’t get any better than this.

As he continued to massage what remained of the baby’s head, kneading it as a baker working the dough, he took note of the family’s property. These people lived in a huge house. Lots of money. Three BMWs in the driveway, one for each of them.

This baby had been prepared by the best of hospitals. Given the best of care and fed the best of the best of the mother’s milk.

When he felt he had the head worked to perfection, he shoved it into his mouth.

Chewing. Slowly.

Baby blood all over his teeth, dribbling along the corners of his mouth and down his chin in narrow trickles.

Savoring the moment, this rare, special meal.

Satisfying.

He snapped off an arm as if it were nothing more than a chicken wing. The skin soft. Tender and juicy.

He ripped off the other arm and plunged it into his mouth, the urgency returning now, consuming faster, stripping it to the bone as one would slurp the meat off a chicken wing on twenty-five-cent wing night. As if this might be the last of them.

Behind him, the family’s chorus of anguish rose to the heavens as he finished off what was left of this God-given meal.

Divine.

A spectacular offering.

YUMS YUMS.