In Which Eating Kids is Not a Big Deal

I just looked out my window
the one window that is not completely obscured
by the plastic bags and broken dreams we have used to insulate our house
and it is a god damn winter wonderland out there
by which I mean
it is about t-minus ten minutes until my room-mates and I start drawing straws to see who gets eaten
AND WITH THAT IN MIND
allow me to re-introduce you to the people who pretty much invented being cold
THE ESKIMOS OF ANGMAGSALIK

Okay so there’s this dude
he is a pretty lonely dude
cause last winter all his neighbors starved to death and he ate them
so yeah
that’s some messed-up shit for a person to have to go through
and now it’s summer
(by which I mean slightly less terrible winter)
and he is back to catching seals and all is good
except he gets home one day with some seals
and he gives them to his wife to cut up
(yeah his wife is still alive too
which means you can’t blame any of the shit he’s about to do
on not getting laid)
but his wife is taking SOOOO LOOOONG to cut up those seals
and that boiling water looks SOOOO GOOOOD
and he gets to thinking “man, you know what I really miss?
the taste of human flesh.”
so he grabs his son and boils him alive
and then his wife comes back in like “hey where’s our son?”
and he hides the boiled child behind his back like “uh, uh…
who knows?
probably out playing with his friends or something”
and his wife is like “honey he doesn’t have any friends
we ate all his friends
but whatever, i guess
let’s eat dinner”

so they sit down for dinner
and the husband is real sly
and sneaks all that tasty child meat onto the table somehow
like i don’t know
maybe in a paper bag or something
and he decides that instead of eating the tasty seal meat
he is going to exclusively eat his own son
because i mean
if you go through the trouble to kill your son
you don’t want to let that meat go to waste
and it’s not like their whole nation is a vast refrigerator or anything
so leftovers are definitely not an option
which is why they end up throwing all the uneaten seal meat outside
where this old dude finds it and chows the fuck DOWN

now, this is no ordinary old dude.
This dude is the ONLY OTHER SURVIVOR of last winter’s cannibal holocaust
so he’s basically starving his ass off
in fact his ass long ago left him for greener pastures
what i mean is, he’s real skinny
(and someone ate his ass)

so this old starving dude eats all this steaming fresh seal meat
and then he goes inside and they give him MORE seal meat
and the whole time, cannibal dad is like “hmmm
maybe I’ll eat this guy too”
except he doesn’t
he just lets him crash at his place
and in the morning he kicks him out
because i guess the temptation would be TOO GREAT
and he gives the old man a ride back to his own house
and rows back in his kayak
and later they find out that the old man died
because he ate too much after starving for too long.
The end.

…wait
WAIT
THAT’S the end of the story?
There are literally NO consequences for filicide/cannibalism??
The whole time I was reading this story I was like damn
this dude is a grade A sociopath
good thing this is a fable designed to teach us lessons
and so he will not be allowed to escape unscathed
but as far as this myth is concerned
cooking and eating your own son
is about as dramatic as going to the fucking grocery store
ESKIMOS
I HAVE TWO WORDS FOR YOU:
WHATIS
WRONGWITHYOU

so the moral of the story
is obviously that the most efficient path to becoming a virtuous person
is to kill and eat everyone within a nine-mile radius
then you can’t help but be virtuous
because there’s no one left to kill and eat.

THE END.

18 thoughts on “In Which Eating Kids is Not a Big Deal

  1. Pretty funny, and I feel for your insulation made out of broken dreams. I do have to add, though, that many people find the term “Eskimo” to be a slur (it means “eater of raw meat” in Cree, which is, you guess it, pretty much the equivalent of “cannibal”). “Inuit” (singular “Inuk,” language “Inuktitut” for most of them) would be the proper term. Also, I have to mention that you put Apache and Cree peoples in the same category in Native American, but they are two fundamentally different peoples, with different ethnolinguistic groups and geographic areas. Sorry for being a bore but this is important to me :).

  2. Any chance you’re going to do Wendigo stories, since cannibalism seems to be all the rage? I could dig up(!) a few for you.

      • 🙂 Do you know the one where Nanabozho (roughly Weesageechak’s equivalent in Anishnaabe / Ojibway orature) drowns the wendigos in a lake? I could scan it from Basil Johnston’s book The Manitous. Interested, Ovid?

    • I would never object to myths from my neck of the woods! I personally think the stories about the Chinook Wind and the way the mountains came to be how they are have great potential for hilarity.

      Also, since the Chinook Wind is the wind that heralds the end of wintertime, it might be a good myth for March.

  3. I think his eating his son was actually the punishment for the original cannibalism to keep from starving over the winter–the Greenlandic stories have this motif of cannibalism being addicting. You just eat one person to stay alive for the winter, and next thing you know you’re eating your own son when there’s plenty of seal meat. It’s like one of those anti-drug campaigns: Just say no to human flesh.

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  6. You would think that the wife would have been tipped off by the fact that there were more leftovers than there was food to begin with. I mean, does this guy think he is? Jesus?

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