Take My Cheeks, Please!

I guess I could eat a person if I absolutely had to.  I don't mean if someone had a gun to my head and said, "Chew this guy's arm fat or I will shoot you." Then, I'd take the bullet. I really would. But, let's say I was on a plane that went nose-first into the side of some icy mountain top, and me and the other half dozen or so survivors had already eaten everything we could to survive: complimentary peanut bags flung from the aircraft and lodged in treetops, unnaturally round patties of chicken with faux grill marks, mayonnaise packets adorned with the airline's logo, frozen gum sticks pulled out of the back pockets of bodies here and there, coffee goo licked from the insides of previously-considered-empty Starbucks to-go cups. When all that was gone, we'd chomp on snow for awhile. That's all there is. Snow. And a few trees. That and a massive mound of twisted metal and wiry guts that once was our plane.

But I'm telling you, there are no animals around. If there were, we'd eat them. Oh, maybe we'd get lucky and find the one high-altitude mammal that got left behind. I picture a marmoset. (Upon googling "marmoset" to make sure I had the right animal name, I realize I made a dreadful mistake. I'd eat a person before I'd eat one of these cute little creatures, for sure. See photo.)

 

What I meant to say is that I picture a capybara. That's just the squirrel/rabbit/dog combo that I could imagine a few survivors running around and wrestling to the ground. I couldn't kill it, personally. I'd bawl like a baby. I'd bawl all the way through chewing its grizzly little flesh, too. But I'd be hungry and my aching belly would be calling the shots from here on out.

People-eating would only be brought up when everything, I mean everything else had been eaten. Trees would be stripped of their bark by this time. Woozy survivors would be found gnawing on the plane's blown-out tires to no avail. It would have to get to the point where there was really no other choice but to lay down and die.

I've seen cartoons where one guy is super-duper hungry. Say he's trapped in some small shipping container with another guy. The hungry guy looks over at the other and suddenly imagines the guy's head to be a nice, juicy steak. He's just a big old steak with a person's body, standing there in that confined space. The hungry guy starts salivating and that steak-head just keeps looking better and better. 

I imagine that after days and days, weeks, maybe- of being hungry up there in the snow-prison, somebody's head might start looking like a steak. If I really had to, I mean really had to, I think I could do it.

I've pointed out to more than one person which parts of myself I thought would make for decent snacking if someone near me got desperate enough. My cheeks have always been plump and a bit squishy, and I'm guessing they'd be sought after like the drumsticks on a chicken. If we're ever stuck on a mountain like that, after a crash, and you've eaten everything there is but the passengers packed in ice around you, I give you permission to eat my cheeks. Not my butt cheeks, of course. Because that is just wrong, and a little gross, if you ask me. But you can have at my face. 

 

(*DISCLAIMER FOR MY MOTHER: I am not planning on crashing a plane. I do not crave human flesh. I have never eaten human flesh. But I have eaten chicken, which sometimes seems just as crazy of an idea if I give it some thought. I am not issuing an invitation for some stranger or crazy ex-boyfriend from the 1980s to come find me and slice off my cheeks and eat them. I do not sit around and think about what it would be like if I had to eat people after a plane crash. Only sometimes. And that's only after I read the book "Alive," where people did eat people. I would not eat you, or dad, or Amy, or Leif, or Rose. Even if I would, I'd lie about it right now to make you feel better. Two sentences ago was the truth.)