The Cadaver Eater

Waiting along the shores, deserted, to return home from a long day of relaxation; hunger has gotten to him, the urge to taste of flesh salivated in his mouth, dead flesh, cooked—sometimes rare, often medium rare. The smell of barbeque meat, steak; the scent of burning flesh made its way to his nose, up his nostrils and down his throat. The clear day made the drive home pleasant, the smell of burning meat left a taste in his mouth.
It took him back to the first time he tasted flesh. It had a weird taste, almost like chicken—not like what he had read or like eating turtle, rat or snake meat. The first time he heard about eating this kind of flesh intrigued him, from a show on National Geographic about a man in India who would come around when he found out someone had recently died. Cannibalism. Human flesh. Ever since then he wondered what it would taste like. There was a serial killer that ate human flesh a little over a decade ago. Jeffrey Dalmer. Someone killed him in prison. That story disgusted him. It wasn’t like the story of the man from India. He didn’t kill anyone to cut them up and then eat them. He waited until they died and buried. Some families would give him permission to eat their love one’s flesh. Serial killers story didn’t interest him.
He didn’t want to be like Dalmer. He wasn’t a killer. Over the years the urge to taste human flesh grew. He tried the Gothic, vampire world, drinking blood. He didn’t fancy it that much. He didn’t like the taste of blood that much, a little maybe, but not as much as those vampire Gothic people were drinking. Plus he didn’t like the hanging out with those people; they gave him the creeps. He was searching for a way to taste human flesh. He tried digging up graves but found that buried flesh decomposed very fast and it smelled. The smell of death bothered him.
For months he tried to figure out how to acquire human flesh, dead but not decomposed. Not murdering and then cutting up people either. The urged drove him mad. The substitute of cow meat, of chicken, of fish or any kind of meat didn’t satisfy him. One day, while driving around, it came to him. “The morgue!” It was a eureka moment. Those people were already dead; some just recently too. Ideas began to come to him about places where he could get a dead body, a cadaver. The hospital.
It took him a while to find a morgue and scout out the place, figuring out who worked there and what time they closed, when they were busy and when they were not. Then he had to figure how to get the body out of the morgue without being noticed or caught.
For weeks he planned the “heist” as he called it. The urge to taste human flesh was weighing on him. The closer he got to pulling of his heist the more excited he got—and nervous. He had never done anything like this before. It would be his first major crime, an immoral one at that. His urges got the better of him. He kept thinking about that old man in India, scaly, his ribs showing like he was malnourished, vulture-like.
On the night of the heist he surveyed the area, parked across the street, waited and watched. He found a side door that he could pick the lock. It was something he done before, breaking into his brother’s room to steal some baseball cards and traded them with his friends. He learned it on his own. Patiently he waited until it got dark and everyone had gone home and hardly any cars were out. One thing he had to be careful about, patrol cars driving around. This night he didn’t see any, at least not so far. A few newspapers and magazines sat on his passenger seat. He had gone through the day’s newspaper and was reading some articles in the magazines. Maxim and Sports Illustrated.
In his trunk he had a huge trash bag to put the cadaver in and carry it out to the car. He waited and waited and waited, reading until only the dimly lit lamp post shun down on him. His body was nervous and heart beating in fear and excitement. Every so often he’d look up to see if anyone was around. When he thought it was clear, he pulled the lever to open his trunk, just enough so he didn’t have to take his key out to unlock it. Like a thief in the night, he quickly rushed to the side door, picked the lock and hurried in to find a cadaver, any cadaver. He wasn’t particular whether it’d be a male or female, young or old. He was so nervous, fearing of getting caught—that someone was bound to barge in and catch him in the act soon, he grabbed the first dead body he found.
He remembered where they put them when I came to check out caskets, pretending to be interested in buying one in the near future. He saw what the place looked like from the inside. He asked a lot of questions about the place and what they do there, aside from holding funerals and cremating bodies. “How many funerals do you have in a day?” he’d asked.
“Several.”
“How often do you get new bodies?”
“Every few days or so.”
Some of the questions seemed a bit strange. The director thought that he was probably just curious, nothing more. Then the director gave detail information on how they go about preparing the body for the funeral or, if the family chooses, cremation.
The body was cold. He didn’t quick look at it, he just grabbed and stuff it into the plastic trash bag with towels. It was a hefty trash bag, very sturdy and didn’t tear. He carried the body out to his car, rushing as fast as he could. His eyes looking around jogged to his car with the dead, limp body over his shoulder. With his trunk already unlocked, he pulled up and dropped the body in. After closing the trunk he took a quick look around and got in his car and drove off. Looking at his side mirror, his rearview mirror to see if anyone saw him or if he someone was following him. It was the city that he lived in. He went to the nearby city morgue to get the cadaver.
When he got home, he pulled inside his garage instead of parking in the driveway like he usually did. The body didn’t smell of decomposing corpse with maggots devouring it. He had place a bunch of towels on one side of the garage, preparing to cut sections of the body that he wanted to eat; that he wanted to taste. Again, his thoughts went to that man in India, wondering how it would taste. Already figuring how he was going to taste his first flesh, he began cutting the parts he wanted, the thighs, the calves, the biceps, the triceps and parts of the torso. Everything else he discarded, throwing them back into the trash bags. Several coolers were also in the shelves in the garage, waiting to be filled. He did all this before he went to get the cadaver.
The flesh was cold, pale, drained of blood. He covered the face when he was cutting it, and the genitals area. It was the muscles that he wanted, not the digest system. The heart intrigued him a bit, but he passed on it. After he got what he wanted and threw the other parts into the trash bags, placed them in a corner to throw them away the next day, he took the coolers and put them into one of those large freezers. Not like those in the back of restaurants or in supermarkets, it was large enough to put all those coolers in.
One cooler he took it with him into the kitchen. He didn’t which part of the meat was in it. He was planning to cook and seasoned it, like a gourmet meal. All the ingredients were in the covert. After getting one piece of meat out he put that cooler in the freezer in his refrigerator. The meat took about the same time it took a chicken breast to cook. It sizzled in the skillet, and there wasn’t much of a smell, only her parsley, oregano, cilantro, and other ingredient to get any foul smell he thought would come from it. There was no smell of formaldehyde. He smiled at that relief.
With a glass of wine waiting on the table, he took his plate and sat down to eat. He chewed the first bite carefully, getting a feel for it, a taste for it—trying to figure out what it tasted like, chicken? steak? fish? It was something he could figure. It had a strange taste. He tried to compare each bite to other kind of meat he had eaten before. It was nothing like it. Yet he liked it. He kept eating. This first taste of human flesh, of a cadaver didn’t deter him from eating more.
On the drive home he was getting that craving again. It had been some time since he eaten that kind of flesh. He had to stay on a down low for a while. There was a report in the new about bodies disappearing from the morgue. If he had continued, he would’ve gotten caught. He didn’t want that to happen. So every few months he’d go to a different morgue to get his flesh, this time he would cut only the parts that he wanted. One time he almost got caught. He thought he heard a noise, thinking that someone had stumbled into what he was doing; finding out that he was the body snatcher. It rushed him and he jetted out of there as fast as he could.
Today he already has his flesh in his freezer. They’re waiting for him. His mouth watered, salivating at the thought. “Now I know what the Indian guy was feeling,” he proclaimed. “I am Canube, the cadaver eater.” “Not the ‘Purple People Eater’, but the cadaver eater.” He chuckles. “Canube, Canube, Canube,” he repeats with the beat of the radio.

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