HOW TO BE A CANNIBAL

When the cannibals learned from the Europeans that eating each other was inhumane, they dropped the nomadic thing and began cutting down the trees on their tiny island to make houses and farmland. The Europeans had taught them well. The cannibals were gung-ho for gardening. They gave up the animal-skin tents that had been passed down through their families since the time when their tiny island had been populated by elephant seals and buffalo and wild turkey and ostriches and alligators, and moved into European-style mansions like the ones the explorers had left behind. It took several tries before they could make houses that could stand on their own and not kill the inhabitants—losses which the cannibals regretted for the waste of food, at first—but eventually they got the hang of it. They cleared the tiny island into sand and sand and sand in which to plant their new European seeds, they repressed the desire to eat each other with the help of civilized conversation, and they had a beach day to celebrate. They danced in the waves and had sex and started babies that wouldn’t be eaten by other families’ babies.

Those first few months of summer, the warrior types learned to hunt whatever birds migrated through and fish the lagoons which had never been fished. The non-warrior types, in order to keep themselves busy, decided to create a school to educate their children about the new history of their country.

The cannibals never considered that the European seeds might not grow in their tiny island’s unfertilized soil. This discovery set people pulling out their hair and threatening to eat it for whatever trace of their old life it contained. The tribal leader decided to rely, for the time being, on whatever could be hunted. At the end of the year, on the second beach day, the cannibals took their newborns down to the water and, in the ancient tradition, showed off how well their babies could swim, happy at least that the weakest ones would no longer be chosen for veal.

Their problems worsened, however. In the second year, they realized they were not getting enough vitamins, having cut down all the trees for their mansions and all the plants to make room for seeds that never grew. As the deaths piled up, the tribe began eating seaweed to compensate. Grumbling began over this new taste, but they were determined to live without cannibalism. Some of the infants passed away and the tribal leader—as he used to do when an outbreak meant a widespread loss in their future food supply—encouraged couples to have babies and babies and babies.

The third year, non-cannibalism finally began to improve. They used the rest of the trees to make canoes and became a seafaring people. They ate whatever green things they could pull up in the lagoons and were soon experts at spearing the little fish that swam around the island. Babies were born again, and on beach day, everyone talked about the joy of living and no one mentioned so much as a succulent toe.

By the tenth year, families were really filling out their mansions with children. The schools were packed, though there wasn’t any wood left on the tiny island to expand them. Parents were happy to grow old and to see their children grow old and not have to await the day when their children would eat them. Bullies, instead of eating the weaker kids, were only throwing rocks at them or pulling their hair or stuffing fish bones up their noses. The canoes were having to go into deeper water for fish and the plants in the lagoons seemed to be running out, but nobody was worried. Everyone was fat and happy and living in a mansion.

Then, as some of the parents were becoming the first grandparents anyone could remember, the last lagoon weed was pulled up. The tribal leader said to remain calm. The grandparents were happy to be alive at such an old age and they were the ones that ran the tribe. But by the time the fish became scarce and the vitamin deficiency reappeared, the children of the old tribal leaders were calling for action. What else could the leaders do?—those middle-aged cannibals, hungry and despairing and filled with memories of steaming two-legged flesh—they decided to take back up the old ways.

The tribal leader made this announcement at the twenty-fifth annual beach day. It was a shock to a majority of the tribe that they had ever been cannibals at all, because the schools, after the fifth year, had wiped this fact from the tiny island’s history.

The tribal leader was soon tethered to a tree like a dog, to protect the youngsters from him. The grown children of the old cannibals were certain a solution would come up that didn’t have anything to do with eating each other. If their tribe really had at one time been cannibals, then reverting to those ways was out of the question now more than ever. They decided to tear down the tribal leader’s mansion and take that wood and the wood from all the canoes and build a giant yacht that could bring a few messengers to Europe, to the great civilizations from which their new history had begun a quarter of a century ago.

The yacht set off with thirty of their most able-bodied ex-cannibals, in the direction that the old leaders said they remembered the Europeans had taken. There was much fanfare and every family came out and crowded the entire beach of the tiny island to wave goodbye. Here the story has two parts.

Following the yacht, the thirty new sailors sped off with no idea of where they were going. Just a dream of golden buildings and animals on four legs and extra-civilized conversation. After a month, they were lost and starving. That far out from the shore, their spear-fishing was mostly useless, though they had managed to catch a few dolphins that had come up too close to their yacht. They had scurvy and foul tempers. But they had to do something. By now, plenty of children—children!—had probably starved to death, their own little brothers and sisters. Their entire tribe back home was counting on them for survival. The idea of the old tribal leader started to get stuck in their heads; one sailor mentioned it aloud, and then it spread to the others like a virus. They thought of it very logically. They could just eat the fattest, most useless of them, and then ration out the portions for the rest of the trip. When they got to the Europeans, it wouldn’t matter. The Europeans would come back and fix everything and the sailors would still be heroes, they would still have saved their tribe. If they didn’t survive, the whole tribe would die with them. So they began to eat.

Back on the island, the tribe had hope and ideals. They ate algae off the wells they had dug in their island and hunted the few birds that still passed through and ate insects—for everywhere has insects. The old tribal leader was branded a criminal, and though they were sad when he was the first to starve, the other ex-cannibals comforted themselves with the thought that if anyone was to die, he was the one who most deserved it. After two months, they decided to tear down another mansion and make a small trimaran to see if the fish had come back. Diseases were spreading quickly, but they held on to the hope that they would be saved. When the other old cannibals started suggesting, one by one, that cannibalism be revived, they were locked up in their houses and left to starve, so that the remaining elders kept their mouths shut and ate the praying mantises they were given.

Two months turned into four and still nobody came to help. People began dying off at a quicker pace. In some homes, children died, and in others, parents tried so hard to keep their kids alive that they died off and left the kids alone. Slowly, everything began to fall apart, but they would not give in to cannibalism. If nothing else, they would die without that shame. Families tried to die together, even committing suicide, so that they would not have to suffer without each other’s company. People died and died and died, but after the last elder was killed over speculation that he had eaten a lost child, nobody ever mentioned cannibalism again as an option. They knew in their hearts that the ship would return. They could survive as long as someone was out there. The people that they had sent off the tiny island were their best and brightest, and surely wouldn’t fail them. Those sailors would represent their tiny island of civilization to the Europeans and would return with life.

Finally, when there were five left, a ship appeared on the horizon and came to them. The crew disembarked and saw the death everywhere and the dead bodies that had become too numerous to bury, and the five survivors. Whatever happened to the yacht we sent for help? the survivors asked. The captain said that a single sailor had arrived in Europe with the tale of their tiny island. The sailor had killed and eaten everyone else on the yacht, and had been tried for it and hanged. But there had been a huge outcry of pity—and even sympathy—for the tribe, and curiosity over what their civilization was like. The captain had been ordered to go to the island and write a formal report. He gave the five survivors the option either to stay on the island and start over or to leave and go with the crew to Europe. As the survivors sailed away with the Europeans, they looked back at their mansions and were filled with a sort of homesickness and regret, a feeling that what they’d had on their tiny island they would never again be able to find.

By Matthew Salesses