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river rat: Mombie dearest.
I get all choked up talking about my mother sometimes. She died when I was 21, and to people whose mother or father passed earlier in their lives than that, 21 might seem like a bunch of years to have with a parent, and it is. She was always there when I needed help even if she couldn’t completely fix it and she was always the cheerleader every child wants and needs working the sidelines on their behalf. I was too wrapped up in my sports, music, and friends to pay her proper attention the last seven years she was alive and that is my only regret so far.
After all, no one, and I mean NO ONE, knows more about eating brains than her.
“Don’t let me see you go wicked tearin’ into a green skull for the rippled flesh.” She scolded us anytime we dove into a kindergarten tour group at the cemetery where we lived/died/stumbled blindly.
“Your father used to go for that young mush, but not you, young man.” I loved watching her mash 700 cc’s worth of spongioform mass into a chilled bowl and weight it down with a brick. “I NEVER want to hear tell of you taking a pre-adolescent’s brain, you hear me?”
Man, did I ever. She’d wag that right index finger – what was left of it – snorting through her exposed nasal passages – dust would fly all directions – and I listened.
“He disgusted me with that, old enough to pee, old enough for me line just before he ate the Thompson boy next door or went on a cerebellum bender over at Kinder Kare making us seem, I don’t know, evil somehow.”
If momma wasn’t chilling and pressing fluid from a fresh brain, readying it for a quick fry in duck fat, she was going all preachy on how bad a Zombie our father was and how his taste for young noggin is what drove us from our hometown cemetery. I’m sure she’ll never get over it; she’ll fall completely off the bone first.
“Now, when you press, make sure the material is cold – just above freezing.” This is right about the point where she would have drooled if it weren’t for maggots having eaten her salivary glands so very long ago.
“Hold this.” She handed me the brick and pulled the flattened brain from the iced bowl, tossing it like a Frisbee into a deep fat fryer. It hissed and popped white noise, reminding me of that time I ate a cop’s brain and his scanner got gobbed up with blood and stuck mid-channel the whole time, nearly drowning out the joyous timbre of his precious screams.
“You know when it’s done, dontcha’?” For the millionth time, the same dam question, the same beautiful smile full of putrefaction and gum line.
“Yes, mother.” I sighed. “When there’s none left.”
She loved that one. I can still hear her laugh. It sounded like handful after handful of gravel tossed down a storm drain. Ah, good times.
