short story

America had seen better days.
     A few months into that very long winter foreign armies pretty much came and went at will. They’d quit fighting us and fought one another over patches of the continent.
      Iranians. Argentines.
      Norwegians.
      The French.
      We wondered what the hell they wanted with this barren piece of crap anyway, but then they had problems in their own countries and lusted after the fantasy of freedom and prosperity ours had been known for only decades earlier. They’d always loved and hated us simultaneously – had viewed us “fat Americans” with an unhealthy mixture of fear, contempt, envy, and genuine affection.
      Not having anywhere else to go, the wife and I stayed on our little plot of land, a sandy patch of dead weeds and scrub oak in that no man's land that was once central South Carolina. It hadn’t offered much in the way of resources even in “the good old days," so there was simply nothing there that would bring throngs of marauders or scavengers our way.
      We stayed put and got used to the new ways.
      Which pretty much involved freezing, starving, and, until we discovered the little trickle of a creek up on the deserted Lucas farm, experiencing near fatal dehydration. In a few months time the last of the canned goods had been eaten and the firewood all burned, including the scrub oak, the interior doors, and most of the furniture.
      We had nothing in the way of fire arms, so we just hid when strangers passed through. We'd picked up on the fact that folks were eating people. Not so much family, I supposed, as friends and neighbors. You didn't know who to trust anymore, but it was a matter of protein. There just wasn't much else to be had in the way of nutrition. Still, I honestly figured the missus and I were safe just based on the idea that we were so damn unappetizing.
      Old.
      Bony.
      Rheumatic.
      Constipated.
      As far as us eating other folk, I thought the difficulty might be more in the gutting and skinning than in the killing.
      "We don't have to skin them," my wife said. "The skin is the best part."
      It was supposed to be a joke, but it should have made me realize that whatever resolve to remain a civilized person she possessed was dissipating, and that the woman I'd married almost fifty-five years prior might not be beyond the idea of noshing on another human being.
      And she was, of course, really thinking of chicken. How long had it been since we'd seen a chicken, or any kind of bird for that matter? Or even a rat? Or a goddamned cockroach? They’d always told us roaches would be around forever, but the wife and I had obviously outlived them.
      Anyway, one bleak afternoon the kid showed up wielding a baseball bat with a six inch nail driven through and scoured the place while me and the missus cowered under the house. And when he saw that there wasn't a speck of food in the place, the little bastard decided to rest his bones under our quilts. We watched through spaces between the floorboards as he peeled down, climbed into our bed, and pulled the covers up.
      And then, suddenly, we knew we had a decision to make.
      Because whether I liked it or not, there was about a hundred pounds of meat napping in our bed with the implement of death leaning on the nightstand. We crept out and sneaked to the barn, where we figured our voices wouldn't carry, and whispered vehemently to one another. Malnourished as I was, I couldn't see smashing a young man's head and gutting him for meat.
      Katie saw it otherwise.
      "It's him or us," she said. "Don't think for two seconds that little shit wouldn't shove a skewer down your throat and out your butthole and roast your bony tail for the grizzle. People ain't what they used to be."
      "They ain't cows," I said.
      "Well, hell, they’s dogs," she sniped. "They eat dogs in the far east. Only difference 'tween us and them Asians is we're cold and hungry, and you’ve got to debate the moral implications of killing a dog for meat. That boy is dangerous. We got to kill him anyways if he stays, and if we got to kill him, we might as well eat him."
      "I ain't guttin' no human being," I said. I knew I was whupped -- that Katie was right about the boy being a hazard and that we'd likely have to kill him or be killed but, I swear, I didn't think I could prepare his body for the grill. I had to put my foot down somewhere.
      "I'll gut him," she said. "I ain't so squeamish that I got to starve.”
      “Then I’ll get to it,” I told her. Fair was fair. If she was going to butcher the boy's body, the least I could do was put him out of his misery. My plan, if you want to call it that, was simply to enter our ramshackle shanty through the back door, creep to the bedroom, grab that bat, and let the boy have it, the key being that he'd found our lumpy, mildewed old mattress comfortable enough to fall into a coma and wouldn't hear the bugle call of our creaking floorboards.
      Sure enough, he remained asleep as I entered the room and took the bat in hand. Even having raised that spiked club overhead I took a moment to scrutinize the boy I was about to execute. He couldn't have been more than fifteen, even considering that malnutrition or unchecked childhood disease might have stunted his development. Laying still as he was, except for the steady, peaceful rise and fall his of emaciated little chest, he looked almost angelic, what with his school boy's mustache, the spray of freckles that decorated his pinch of a nose, and the mass of brownish red curls that framed his pale features.
      A handsome young devil, I thought. Perhaps not much different than I had been back in the days when, inspired by the likes of Jack London, Conye West, and Keith Urban, I’d dreamed of becoming a writer/adventurer/amazingly well paid spoken word poet and rap/country musician, and of changing the world to suit my own underdeveloped and idealistic philosophies while having relations with a bevy of enormously well endowed, musically savvy, and sexually adventurous young women of various nationalities.
      I wondered in those brief few seconds what this svelte and dashing youngster, transitioning as he was from boy to man, might actually be dreaming of as he slept so deeply. If European...if, say, he was a deserter from one of the many fronts in the Midwest for which mercenary armies had long been "recruiting" youths of the lower classes in Western Europe, he was perhaps dreaming of a home complete with mother, father, and siblings, and a vat of stew bubbling on the stove top. If a native, he probably had no memories on which to base such a pleasant romp through dreamland.
      Or maybe he was conjuring images of heaven, or of some other futuristic paradise.
      Or maybe, like the rest of us, he was too tired and hungry to dream.
      It was probably my intense scrutiny that woke the boy. In an instant his brown eyes popped open and locked with my own terrified peepers, and in that same instant, as he opened his mouth to speak, I brought that long wooden hammer down hard enough to dent his skull. That spike went deep, and took tissue on the way out, and so I knew the boy was dead or close to it. Still I swung again just to be sure, deforming the childlike features that had inspired my ruminations only a moment before.
      I dragged his bony carcass down the hall, leaving a trail of blood on floorboards that would eventually be fuel for the fire that roasted him. Katie met me at the front door, and we hauled him to the slaughter pen where, true to her word, she hung him from the hook like a shoat and worked him over.
      What we didn't eat during the feast that followed we stored in the icy mud at the creek.
      After the meal I excused myself and, once behind the barn, thought hard of what we'd done, and mourned that boy with much wailing and gnashing of teeth and, Katie would remind me, much picking of teeth as well...mourned that boy and the man he might have become. Not many years before, when we were the United States of America and known throughout the world by the slogan "land of the free and home of brave," word that a human being had been cannibalized would have shocked, dismayed, outraged, and perhaps mobilized the entire nation.
      These days it didn’t mean shit. Not to Katie. Apparently not to me. And probably not to anyone else who wasn’t being filleted or sauteed.
      Perhaps I mourned that more than I did the one individual I’d crowned with a spiked baseball bat and then, after my wife cut him up like a chicken, broiled his thigh and ate it, lamenting the absence of a decent sauce.