No Gein: Leftovers. Clarice, The First Taste Chapter Five.

September 2003

Clarice just finished telling her Uncle Milton the story of her first kill.

“You finally brought home dinner.” Emily’s face glowed from the combination of the campfire and the pride she felt for her granddaughter. “He tasted great too!”

“Smokers never tase great.” Walt said as he stood up. The fire was slowly dying out by now, and Clarice’s grandfather poured a pale of water to extinguish the remaining flames.

Milton listened the whole time Clarice told her story. He remained quiet as his family curled up in their sleeping bags in the grass, far off the interstate where no one would see them. Watching the smoke rise from the smoldering pit that was their campfire, he remained sitting, looking out over the darkness while his family began their slumber.

Finally, he layed down on his blanket next to the van. Milton remembered that day so many years ago when he visited the prison Chaplin. Thinking back to that moment as he lay looking up at the stars, he chalked it up to having a weak moment. To his right lay Clarice in her sleeping bag, that teenage boys severed head lay next to her. She was still awake, gazing into the dead head’s eyes, her hands caressed the cold skin as if it were and undead lover. “Yeah, that Clarice is certainly a chip off the old bloc.” He thought to himself. Looking to his left, Milton’s parents were fast asleep. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this while trip was a wild goose chase. Naturally he wouldn’t dare say this aloud, but when passing through their home town he thought about pulling off the interstate and insisting they just go home. However, he could tell this little road trip of death made his father feel alive. Moments like tonight, and in that alleyway in New Jersey, made him feel like it was 1974 all over again. The clan was back together, and mayhem and murder followed. Milton wanted to enjoy every moment he could with both his parents while they were still around. Before they were, before..

Milton now turned upwards to gaze at the stars. He wondered if his brother was up there somewhere. Was it really like they said in those Sunday school stories, was he really up there looking down on him and his family? “Hey  Frost,” he whispered, waving at the stars light years away. “Are you really up there looking down on us?” If so, Milton pondered, then his departed brother could see all the chaos and death he and his family had been causing, and he’d be proud. He’d be be especially proud of his “daughter.” Milton himself never wanted kids, but he remembered Forst always had a soft spot for him. Since the moment he found her as a little baby in the back of that house after dispatching her parents, he loved her like her own. “You’d be proud of her.” he whispered as he again looked over at her, now fast asleep. “She’s a nut like the rest of us.”

“Ah what the hell am I doing, fucking talking to myself.” He muttered while turning to his left side. Past his parents he could see the now extinguished fire pit. The bones and leftover flesh remained burnt on the spit. Remembering the mighty fire that once roared there not long ago, Milton thought to himself. “That’s the kind of place God would send us to, if any of that shit was real.” He remembered those days back in the prison, it was the first time he’d read the holy book since he was a kid. Good stories actually. He particularly liked the Old Testament, all that wrath of God stuff. If those stories are to be believed, then the Almighty stacked more bodies then ten generations of his family could dare dream. The aroma of burnt flesh still tickled his nostrils as Milton thought about the sinners burning in the eternal pit of flames. “Why should he suffer.” Milton pondered. His family would never be that Norman Rockwell slice of Americana. He loved what he did, and he couldn’t imagine living his life any other way.

Rolling over, once again laying on his back, his eyes again scanned the unspeakably large canvas that was the sky above him. “What an amazing work of art this infinite abyss of the cosmos was. Could all of this really be here by accident?” Before his eyes fell asleep, he had one final closing thought. “If there really is something up there,” he muttered to himself before he fell to sleep, “then he created a butcher like me.”

The End