Cannibalism
by Adam Rothstein
Second Printing published by Smashwords, March 2011.
First Printing by Brute Press, January 2010.
Copyright 2011 by Adam Rothstein
This book is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
For more information, visit http://www.poszu.com
1
Her body's got that taste to it, if you know what I mean. She covers herself in body sprays like the rest of us, but it's not about that, because you can sense it even if you're just watching a recording of her. She's got that delicious flavor, that scent, the one that makes both men and women stand up when she's around, even though they don't know why, like they're ready, like they would do her right there against the wall. Like looking at a fresh baked loaf of bread. Like her skin is the soft crust, slowly releasing steam for no other reason than to get you to bite it. The bacon smell they pipe out of fast food joints, so you know the frying is going on from three blocks away. Carmelized sugar and fat bubbling on the outside of a dumpling in a Chinese restaurant, making you hungry even though you thought you weren't. That's her. That's Plastique's thing. Worth six billion dollars last year alone. She's got her tits and hips insured for a trillion. Company told her it would be cheaper to do them together. Like fries with a shake.
It gets me too, and the reason I'm in this business in the first place is because it never gets me. Sure, every cook gets fat eventually, because you have to taste everything at least a little bit, make sure the spices meld as well as you think, make sure you're not getting complacent in success even though the idiots on the street will keeping coming into your restaurant on name alone. They offer you money for a reservation, because they're fatter than you are, because they think the best is really that much better. But you can't let that get to your head. When it comes to producing sexual entertainment, just like cooking, you have to make sure everything is just right every step of the way. Otherwise you wake up one day, and you're just another Italian restaurant on the block. You have to always be the best to be the best.
It's not a drug dealer's philosophy that makes me only take a small taste, and avoid wholesale sampling of the product. It's not about resisting the lure I'm foisting on everyone else. The sex isn't some slippery slope some line I'm always toeing, with pressures to give in crowding me from all sides, ready to send me spiraling into a psychological hole of my own devising, like the ancient hunter stumbling backward into his own bear trap. I don't give a shit about the sex. This is how I can sell it. If I cared, I'd be the one buying. I'd be pinching my own stash off the top, and I'd be biting myself in the ass, keeping the real money makers for myself, and sooner or later forget I'm running a business. I can see what will sell, and I know how to market it, and then I do it, without hesitation, without keeping anything for my own nuts. This is called producing. You cannot consume what you make, and expect to get rich. And don't give me that shit, because actually, you better believe the money is enough.
This is probably 80% of the secret of my success. These people, they come to me, and they think it's all a big game. If they're on my staff, they think they broke into the cookie jar, and now they get to taste it all for free. The talent, they think they come back to my apartment and wave their dick or their tits in my face, and they're going to make money. I'm not the customer. They think that Choco, the biggest name in the production business, is just like the others, and that it's all a goddamned sexual free-for-all. They take off their clothes, they flop around, they sit in my lap as if I gave a damn. It's fine though, because I can see who has it right away. They come in, they pretend they know something about sex, they try and take off my pants, and I either send them back to lower America, or I send them to wardrobe. If I took the time to explain it to everyone, I'd never get any work done, and I'd never make any money. Let them think what they want. And hell, if they want to buy company product from me, they can turn their paychecks right back over. Suits me fine.
Plastique was the one who knew better. And for all I could tell, she'd always known. It wasn't the makeup, the outfit, or the smell of money emanating from the industry that encouraged her to seek a career in genetically-modified nymphitude. It seemed to me that this was really her. She didn't even take off her coat the first time I met her. She just sat at the conference table, looking at me, and looking at the art on the walls. She knew I was the best in the business, and I knew then that she was going to be. I just took out the contract, she added three zeroes, and that was how Plastique got into show business. She even had her name picked out and legally changed before she arrived. I've got a copy of that contract framed on the wall, with her stage name as legal signature.
It was just something she picked up over time. As she grew into her body, she must have noticed the way it affected anyone within sight of her, and instead of freaking out about it, got down to business. She's a smart kid. She learns fast, and she made all the right moves. But it drives itself, her body taking that smell of her, and honing a point just so, before she sticks it into you. She looks at you, and it gets sharper. She blinks, and yet again. God forbid she stands up and cocks her hip to the side and puts out her lip, that shit is so thin you couldn't even see it, and you wouldn't even see her bodyguard's blade, so blinded with lust, if you lose control of yourself, as many have. I wonder sometimes if she does it on purpose, driving people to the edge, just to make sure she still can. The real great artists give away napkin sketches to the waitstaff for free. Not because it's nothing, but because it does mean something. Just because they can.
And that's what I thought she was doing with me. Some sort of professional power trip, maybe trying to improve her negotiating position by reminding me where the talent truly lies. All the talent goes through a prima donna bit every now and again, and you either let them and show them a little love, or reject it, and toss them out in the street. Depending on the situation. Either way, it's over quick, and then it's back to business. So first thing, I thought about what she wanted from me. The show was going fine, her contract was more than generous, and I hadn't caught wind of any complaints from the staff. So what was it? Why was she turning her aroma on me? Me, the coolest guy in the business.
She didn't stop. There was no demand to go with the threat, direct or implied. She just kept turning up the heat, boiling away in front of me, getting so I couldn't leave the set and just sat there staring, keeping me from even being able to think. I would stand there in the shadows and watch, feeling every twisting motion of the lines from her neck down to her chest, following the bends of her muscles as her hips cantilevering back and forth. I even fantasized about her hands, her perfect fingers, running my tongue down each from the nail to the web and back up the next, tasting her flesh in my mind. Eventually I was left with no other possibility. She wasn't doing it at all. It was me. I was obsessed with Plastique, overflowing with lust for her until I was nearly out of my mind.
I'd like to tell you it got better. I'd like to share my secret on how I rejected the biggest threat to my professional career, and how I turned it back around and put her in her place, making a fortune in the process. But I didn't. I only got worse. I think about her all the time, I put every part of her body against every part of mine in my imagination, my mouth tasting that wonderful taste over and over in endless fantasy, savoring the flavor of Plastique, the most mind-numbingly awestruck sensation the world had to offer. My imagination is fucked, it is tied up and in bed with Plastique twenty-four hours a day, and there isn't any way for it to get off.
My business has fallen apart, talent has deserted me left and right. Competitors are stealing my staff. Plastique's new show is all fucked up, and she's pissed. Thank god for contracts. Because without the threat of legal action on my part, she'd probably desert me immediately. And then, I'd never be able to fuck her. Which is the only thing I need to do.
2
Why? You might ask. How did it start? Was it sudden, or was it always going on, hidden, below the surface, only to burst into the world one day, like a moth from a cocoon? You're asking the wrong questions. None of this matters at all. Everybody always wants clarification. They want explanation, cause and effect rationale, and some sort of basis and context for everything they hear. These are not the right questions to ask. In the form of a single statement, they should rebound off the flat plateau of fact. There is earth underneath your feet. It supports your weight. You are grasping at straws by trying to visualize the massive quantities of rock, the metaphysical proportions of gravity in quantum scale. You will gain nothing. You may simply fall over, as your knees suffer from the fruitless quests of your brain and spine. But when you do, you will still land on the ground.
The fact will remain that we eat human beings.
No moral song and dance here, folks. And please, no metaphor. There is nothing symbolic in mastication, in involuntary peristalsis, in digestion. This is not the ocean which you condescend to visualize as a bountiful bosom of maternal earth's liquid womb of life; this is the cold sea that will fill your lungs, ceasing your ability to breathe and gasp out the metaphors you wish that were. It is the sucking differential in densities that creates buoyancy, and your lack thereof. It is the ecosystem of things down there in the dark which will eat your dead flesh. Because they will. And they do. Bought at the supermarket and butcher, for a price roughly equivalent to organic sirloin steak.
As cow is to beef, humans are to “volk”. It is a minor delicacy; it is served fresh; it is prepared in a myriad ways ranging from seared medallions, to thick and hearty roasts, to the bourgeois throw-back of the “volkburger” served with sweet potato fries. It is considered to be healthy, somewhere on the spectrum between pork and turkey. It is delicious. It can be bought anywhere, all around the world. It is accepted. It is normal. It's organic. It's sustainable. It is totally us. You are what you eat, and you eat what you are. It's not the new black—it's black.