At 9:53am I made the decision to be late to my lecture rather than leave the Vic Books line. For some reason The Hub was always heaving on a Wednesday. Perhaps by that point students had overcome their weekend hangovers and were ready to attend class, but by Thursday they were back to drinking again given they were nearing the end of the week.
“Hello,“ I said in a squeaky fake voice—I was poor at feigning kindness. “Long black.”
The brunette with a nose ring stamped my coffee card and passed it back before writing up my order on a sticky note. She paused and looked back up at me.
“For Chris?”
“Yup.”
She smiled to herself—the baristas took great pleasure in remembering the names of regulars. I think we all liked it to a certain degree. I liked being familiar enough that she could remember my name almost every time. it gave a sense of loyalty to Vic Books over the other coffee outlets here.
Then again, there was also a degree of tragedy to being recognised as a familiar—was I such a being of routine? As humans, we like to think of ourselves as unique, a trout against the stream, but having a barista know my name and order reminded me that l was here every day—waiting in line—at 9:45am before my first lecture.
l was not the most tragic being of routine. An engineering friend, Shea, told me the sorrows of having the girl at Ilott have his order ready before he even asked. He told me it was a wake up call about how often he was eating chicken and chips from there... but so far he has not stopped. No wonder he is a fucking fat lard.
A fat lard who would probably taste good. Tender, juicy fat covered in salt and oil.
The VUW Cannibals Society will not be found on the clubs' registry for obvious reasons. Anyone who signed up for a cannibal club on Clubs Day would likely be put on a police watch list very quickly.
I discovered it through a previous sexual partner who liked to give very painful hickeys. I was at first unsettled by their desire to eat my skin, but once they explained their fantasy I became curious. Humans will eat everything from insects to endangered species—is craving human flesh really so immoral?
The club itself never addresses the fetish aspect of the members. In fact, many of the members have no interest in mixing their sex life with cannibalism. Being a cannibal at Vic is more like... being a chocoholic. Some people eat chocolate off their partner's chest while others prefer to sit alone on the couch at home and gorge a bag of discounted Easter eggs from the Warehouse.
"Long black for Chris," the barista with dreads said, sliding my cup across the counter.
I was always a little embarrassed to collect my cup. It was this Typo cup with pink triangle patterns and the quote “I’d rather take a coffee than compliments just now” from Little Women. Cups with quotes always ooze of pretension. Cups with dumb quotes always say ‘I’m edgy and different, but I still like coffee.’
I did not buy this cup myself. I got it from the office Secret Santa two years ago. I was a temp who happened to be working over the Christmas period so I was included in the office holiday events. Whoever got it for me clearly did not have a clue who I was... let alone the fact I was a man and not a thirteen-year-old girl who thinks a caramel mocha from McCafe is a real coffee.
The traffic was quite bad outside of Vic Books... I, of course, mean the traffic in The Hub, not the actual Kelburn Parade traffic. Students were meant to obey the road rules in the Kelburn campus. You stayed to the left and you gave way at an intersection. I had to wait just outside of Vic Books for a break in the crowd. At which point I slipped across and started heading up the stairs to Cotton.
Being a cannibal was difficult as being a vampire when stuck in a bustling crowd. It was hammering rain outside and the rich smell people heating up under their raincoats was irresistible.
An important question: do cannibals want to kill other humans? Certainly not. I just want humans to be edible without consequence. It’s like necrophiliacs not wanting to kill, rather just fuck dead people... bad example. Necrophiliacs are nasty.
Discussions like this are the type often gone over in VUWCS after screenings of those jungle cannibal movies. Those movies certainly do not put us in a good light, but they are very fun to watch. At the points where you are meant to be grossed out, a cannibal will lean closer and examine the detail of the intestines. We watch cannibal horror films for fun. To satiate our desires we have to watching something more realistic.
Autopsies, surgeries, anything like that. Those videos provide the most tangible sensation. The scalpel becomes the teeth of a cannibal; you are the one sinking your teeth into the flesh. The only downside to these is their clinical aspect. All practical, no pleasure.
The heavy doors were down in Cotton. A guard stood in front. Engineering students and some familiar faces from my class hovered outside. The guard looked green with his eyes as bulbous as Golem’s–clearly he was aware of the situation beyond those doors.
“Bomb threat?” one girl asked.
I turned to answer before her friend could: “No. Someone’s dead in the girls’ bathroom.
Both looked at me, horrified. I maintained a vacant face and went back to the steps down to Vic Books.
Surely they would have to put the whole campus on lockdown? A girl with chunks of flesh missing was slumped over in a bathroom stall.
I waited for the Easterfield elevator. Sure: the elevator took forever and l was only going to the third floor... but walking was not something I had time for.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl wearing a blue headscarf smacked something. Glancing back, the Snapper machine was fucking up again. It had the red screen notice of ‘Out of Order.’ The second girl, the one wearing a white headscarf. picked up her friend's snapper card and placed it back down. The card balance had updated even though the machine said it was out of order.
The elevator door opened. I hurried in–the doors closed oh-so-fast–and stood facing the girls. The friend was pushing the one with Snapper dilemmas along so the next person could use the godforsaken machine. If she had not hurried her along, the girl in the blue headscarf would have straight-up-thrown-down with a Snapper machine.
My heart stopped briefly when a hand clawed the elevator door back open. In stepped a policeman.
FUCK.
Nope. It was all good. He pushed the button for the second floor. Turns out cops are lazy when it comes to staircases just like the rest of us.
Trying to act nonchalant next to a cop in confined space is not as easy as it sounds. The point is to try and act normal... but when you feel the gaze of a policeman you forget what normal even looks like. Why am I crossing my legs while standing up? Stop swaying! Maybe I should vogue. That will be inconspicuous.
l remembered how to breathe when the elevator door closed once again and he was gone. No one had any reason to investigate me. I did not know her. Nobody saw me enter the girls’ bathroom.
That is the nice thing about the Cotton girls’ toilets: there are so few women in the engineering block that they are almost always empty. Waiting around in a stall for a moment to strike was tedious for the same reason. The safety was that you could anticipate no one else would come in for a fair amount of time–especially if you planned your attack to be during lectures rather than at the breaks. Even better yet: no queues for the women's bathroom also meant nobody would grow suspicious of one stall remaining locked for an hour... until the blood started to pool out ofthe stall. A killer would have a good amount of time to get as far away from the scene as possible–but instead I went to Vic Books.
Humans: they taste good going down but not so great when they came back up. I chose the Easterfield toilets to release the bile because they were almost as quiet as the Cotton ones. I could throw up without anyone hearing. This was actually my second option for an attack, but there are more girls here and they can come to the bathrooms quite sporadically. I know: I monitored Easterfield and Cotton for three hours each just to get a sense of the toilet trip frequency of females.
Unfortunately, some other dude came in while I was in the midst of hurling and I was unable to stop it. I heard him step into a stall and quickly got up to bolt for it. I got as far as the mirror before realising I had to clean myself up. Perhaps people would raise eyebrows over a dude walking around while his face was smeared with vomit and blood.
I hit the tap on and slid my hand into the paper-towel dispenser. There were none. Shit.
The guy flushed the toilet. He would leave the stall soon. I bent down and started throwing water on my face. He came out–ignored me entirely–and left without even washing his hands... ew.
There was something haunting about my reflection in the mirror. Still a couple of smears of blood and bile here and there... but the problem was the eyes. They looked feral, almost had a yellow cat-like twinge. They were more incriminating that the smeared on my lips.
That was actually a prominent idea encouraged in Cannibal Society: never feast on someone against their will no matter how delicious they look. A faulty idea. Where on earth would we find people who wanted to be eaten besides those weird weeaboos who love ‘vore’ or whatever that shit is? Those people do not exist. Almost all the members of Cannibal Society struggled with this. but none of them were willing to pursue their desires against the morale... Killing is not instinct even for a cannibal.
I went back into the stall and got a fistful of toilet paper. Back at the sink I washed the rest of the shit off my face. Not literal shit. People who like scatology are fucking monsters in comparison to those who idolise Hannibal Lecture.
My tongue came across a foreign object as I stood there staring at the mirror. I plucked it out with my fingers. It was a squishy white thing... I think the skin from her wrist? Looked paler than the rest of her had been. l put it back in my mouth swallowed. .. Did not taste as good the second time around.
I walked back out of the bathroom cleared of sin, but then l had to walk back in. I forgot my stupid Typo cup and I still had a whole long black.
Looked like I would not be having class today. Two birds, one stone. With that, I untangled my headphones and headed for my Karori flat, listening to Lorde's new song as I went. Damn that girl can sing.
