Peter Cherches

A Long-Forgotten Story

 

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For some reason I recently remembered a story I heard or read as a child. I hadn’t thought about it for years. I can remember the basic contours of the plot, but my memory of the details is quite spotty—like the way I usually remember my dreams. To be honest, I can’t even remember when I actually heard or read the story. It could have been any time between the ages of six and about thirteen. I’m thinking it was either in one of those books of horror stories for kids you’d find at school book fairs, or a tale one of the older kids in the neighborhood would tell the younger ones, outrageous fabrications passed off as true stories. There was one teenager who not only told such stories, he also filled us younger boys in on some of the mysteries of life that baffled us, even if we’d never admit it. For instance, it was from this kid that I learned why all the other boys would laugh at the mere mention of the number 69, but I’m sure at least half of those laughing, like me, were doing it to cover up their ignorance.

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It was a gruesome tale, not the kind you’d usually tell a really young child, though in Brooklyn in the sixties a kid of any age could eventually hear anything. I really wish I could remember the source of the story. If it were in a book I’d be able to go back to it to fill in the missing details. If it were part of the neighborhood oral tradition, then I wouldn’t be so lucky.

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The story is about a family of three, mother, father, and little boy, who are somehow stranded somewhere without food, and with minimal potable water. I don’t remember the boy’s age, or if it was ever stated, but I think he was pretty young, I’d guess no more than eight. I can’t remember the setting at all. They could as easily have been locked in a distant basement where their screams would not be heard as marooned on an uninhabited island barren of animals or edible plant life. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but it was, after all a story. Still, if it were an island you’d think there might be some kind of sea life and maybe some vegetation. But what do I know?

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As I remember it, the family started out with a small ration of food and water, at best several days’ basic sustenance for a single individual. So they had to keep their physical activity to a minimum and make the food and water last among them for as long as possible. Unbeknownst to the mother and child, the father had foregone his own rations so there’d be more to keep his family alive, and he was, therefore, the first to die. 

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Now for the dilemma. The food was all gone, and both mother and child would perish if they did not dine on the father. But how could they do such an abhorrent thing? Not only to eat a fellow human being, enough of a taboo, but one’s own husband or father. Unspeakable! The mother was paralyzed with indecision. How can we eat Teddy, my Teddy, his dad, she wondered. (No, I don’t know if his name was really Teddy.)

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It was the young boy who made the decision, taking on the role, as he now saw it, of the man of the house. “Mommy, we have no choice. If we don’t eat Daddy we’ll die,” he said. Or something to that effect. 

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“But I can’t do it,” the mother insisted. “I can’t just cut him up and prepare him for a meal.”

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“I’ll do it,” the boy said, and he did just that. He cut his father up, and somehow prepared him for eating. I can’t remember if there was any way to make a fire and cook the father. I sure hope there was.

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Even with the weight Teddy had lost before he expired, there was plenty of daddy meat to keep them alive for quite some time. There’s a lot to eat on a person. (Incidentally, I didn’t call it “daddy meat” to be cute. That’s actually how I remember it from the story.)

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At first the mother couldn’t bring herself to eat any of it. But the child pleaded with her. Maybe he said something like, “This meat is no longer father, it’s now our survival.” And then, perhaps, he spoon fed her some of the father meat, her husband’s mortal flesh, that she found so repellent. After that first “meal,” I imagine mother and child embraced tearfully.

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So they were able to stay alive for weeks this way, even if the meat became more foul by the day as they had no way to preserve the father’s cadaver.

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When the daddy meat finally did run out, they had to take stock of the situation once again. They had given up hope on being rescued any time soon. “We’ll save each other,” the boy said. “Whoever dies first will save the other.”

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If not in a book, I’m now thinking it might have been in one of those ’50s horror comics I bought at the used magazine store my friends and I used to frequent. They had all the old Life magazines, lots of issues of Ring magazine, True Confessions, the pulps, physique magazines with black and white covers that I did not know at the time were collected by gay men, and, of course, plenty of comics, most of what my friends came for, D.C. and Marvel.

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As little as I remember of the story, I remember even less about how it ends, i.e. nothing. I don’t even remember which one of them died first.

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There are, of course, endless possibilities of how any story might end, but there isn’t an endless number of really plausible ones. I figure there are a few strong contenders for this story: The mother dies and the child survives for as long as he can on her flesh; perhaps he’s rescued, perhaps not, perhaps we’ll never know. Or the roles are reversed—the little boy dies first, etc., etc.

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But what about more nefarious scenarios? Perhaps the mother, crazed with starvation, already desensitized to the taboo of cannibalism after eating her own husband, sacrifices her child to save her own life. Or perhaps the child, afraid of death, changed by circumstances, his innocence stolen by cruel reality, kills his own mother for food.

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Now that I’m reminded of this long-forgotten story, I really would like to know how it turns out, as each possible ending gives an entirely different coloring to all that came before it, some of which I do remember, after all. Perhaps I’ll even be surprised to learn that both mother and child are rescued just in the nick of time, and neither has to eat the other. Wouldn’t that make for a happy ending?

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A friend of the Macabre from way back, Peter Cherches' new short prose collection, Whistler's Mother's Son, is now available.

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