The Craving

A crimson drop ran down the wall of a stainless steel sink before merging into the little puddle formed at the bottom, swirling around, and disappearing down the drain. Looking at his pinpointed pupils through a bathroom mirror, Steve unclamped his right hand from the edge of the sink and rinsed it under the flowing water. A little piece of flesh, hanging off his pointing finger, danced furiously in the flowing stream. With a sharp, cringing inhalation, Steve pulled his hand near his chest, cradling it with his left hand. His eyes met with his finger and he assessed the damage. The flesh between his second and third knuckle hung onto his finger by the smallest amount of skin. Through the bleeding he could see the bone in his finger. The skin around the injury carried the markings of teeth.

With a crisp inhalation, he grabbed the piece of flesh. He exhaled as he yanked. The skin didn’t tear off until peeling past his fingernail. Steve swore as he threw the bloody piece into the hole in the counter. With a deep sigh, he finished rinsing the blood off of his hands and splashed a bit of water over his clammy face. Then he noticed the indiscreet red stains on his shirt.

Damn.

Loosening his tie and unbuttoning his polo, he noticed the stains had soaked through to his undershirt.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Steve buttoned his shirt back up and sloppily fixed his tie.  With a wad of paper towels pressed to his finger, he cracked the bathroom door open and peered around. The coast was clear. A cringe of pain shot through his hand as he pushed the bathroom door completely open and hurriedly walked past a pair of secretaries. One of them looked up to greet Steve, but stayed quiet. He didn’t make eye contact.

Relieved at covering the short distance back to his cubicle, he plopped into his chair, bumping into his desk as he did so. His computer’s ‘ribbon’ style screensaver deactivated, revealing an unproductive afternoon’s work. He took a look at the unfinished performance report, the cursor blinking mid-sentence. The last word on the page was “unsatisfactory.”

That’s just awesome.
                He pressed ‘ctrl + s’ then ‘alt + f4,’ saving and closing the document.

Steven rolled opened the top drawer in his desk, removed the white plastic organizer, and pulled out a small first aid kit.

-

Due to his firm’s reluctance to higher more employees than necessary, overflow mail often found its way into the cubicles most near the mail room. Steve’s desk just happened to be one of those lucky individuals with frequent mail duty. The mail would pile up. He’d barely have a quarter of his week’s work done by Wednesday, just to have some unattractive woman in a denim dress drop a bin of mail in his cubicle.

“Opened and sorted by 5,” she would say.

I’m a data analyst, not a mail boy.

And so Steven’s work would suffer, and the mail employees definitely didn’t owe him any favors either.

But eventually, he outgrew his hate for mail. When the stress of his usual work relentlessly piled up, the mail provided a nice distraction from tedious work. He bought an envelope opener and perfected his sorting movements. He became the mail woman’s asset. Although he felt opening mail wasn’t resume quality work, he began to take pride in the gigantic stack of empty envelopes he would produce in a short period.

Late one day, near the end of a particularly large stack of money orders, Steve had somehow managed to cut the tip of his finger off his the envelope opener.  He bled furiously, nearly ruining a stack of checks as he stood up and hurried to the bathroom. He bumped into his boss as he turned out of his cubicle, bloodying both of their shirts.

On his way home that day, Steve stopped by a convenience store and picked up a first aid kit.

-

With his finger wrapped up, Steve glanced at his desk clock. Its inner workings were exposed through a glass frame. The roman numerals and hands were gold plated. There was a diamond at the tip of the pointers.

What a dumb gift. I hate my mother.

He squinted to see the blurry numerals. 4:39. He immediately clocked out at his computer, stood up, and began to walk towards the exit hallway.

Certain enough, Steve’s boss found him as he approached the door.

“Where are you going?” he said with an aggravated tone. They were shorthanded enough. “It’s not five yet!”

Steve made an involuntary gesture towards his right hand, cradled in his left. Blood was beginning to seep through the gauze.

“Oh, I see,” Steve’s boss said, lightening up. “Lose a fight with the envelope opener again?” He let out an obnoxious laugh.

Go fuck yourself.

 “Get yourself stitched up, I expect to see you in early tomorrow,” he said with a tone of purpose. With a condescending pat on his underling’s shoulder, he took off in the direction Steve had just come from. He stopped and began attempting to flirt with an attractive young secretary.

-

As Steve approached his car, his bleeding had finally completely saturated the gauze on his finger. He lifted his arm into the air in an attempt to allow gravity to pull his sleeve down and away from the soaked pad. Instead, blood dripped into his forearm. The metallic odor wafted towards his nose, and he began to salivate.

Steve looked around, ensuring no one was around to see him. After he had triple checked, he lifted his sleeve up to his elbow and licked the blood from his skin. He could taste the iron on his tongue.

Images of blood, flesh, and organs poured into his brain as he began to fantasize about all the carnivorous possibilities. A warm, bloody steak. The hearts of freshly slain cattle. Brain straight from a four-legged kill. Intestines from the bowels of euthanized fowl.

Snapping to with drool hanging out of the corner of his mouth, Steve quickly unlocked and entered his car, which was not anything other than modest, and began to drive.

Swerving between lanes, he sped from light to light, navigating a blurred landscape in an effort to reach the nearest grocery store. His heart was set – there was only one option in his mind.

I’ve got to stop this before it’s too late.

After several near-misses and about midway to his home, Steve reached his destination. In a nearly hallucinogenic state, he entered the grocery store. He turned right, and stumbled toward the refrigerated meat.

-

Steve’s sister, who was 3 years his senior, turned twenty mid-May eight years ago. She wandered around her parent’s home mingling with aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, and friends.

“Hey birthday girl,” said an uncle as he cut open a package of cheap steaks.

“Hi,” she replied. Their brief conversation spanned through the elements of any college student’s life: school, job, love, future aspirations. In his distraction, the uncle made a minor cut to his fingertip, and a small amount of blood dripped onto a pile of waste fat he had cut from the steaks.

“Ow!” he said, and turned towards the sink to rinse his hand. When he turned off the water, Steve’s sister told the uncle he could find band aides in the hall bathroom, inside the vanity’s bottom left drawer. He thanked her and disappeared down the hall. The sister finished the uncle’s job. When she was done, she threw the fat away in the kitchen trashcan.

Steve sat alone in a secluded part of the home, trying to figure out what pleasure his sister found in cramping up and already sub-sized home with so many people. Quite frankly, he didn’t find any of the guests as important elements in his upbringing or lifestyle.

With a sign, he stood.

I’d better make an appearance, lest I be the subject of parental lore…

The moment he reminded his mother of his existence, a bombardment of chores flooded forth. Between each request, he made certain to insert a clever sarcastic remark, gesture at his overall discontent, and then make a mental note of the chore.  After a few minutes of bantering, his mother found a distraction and went on her merry way. Steve dragged his feet as he collected all of the trash from the smaller proximity trashcans that had been places throughout the house.

He picked up a few paper plates and plastic silverware that had fallen out as he tried to consolidate all of the trash into the kitchen can. He put the trash on the top of the overfilled can before compacting all of the garbage into the bag. The subsequent gush of air from the can carried a foul odor. But some element of the smell aroused Steve’s brain. Immediately, he felt an insatiable desire for something – but he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

Before he had much time to think about it, his uncle threw open the kitchen door.

“Dinner is served!” he said with a large smile on his face. His hands held a large platter, piled high with thick slabs of meat.

Soon enough, conversation had nearly ceased as all the guests began to dig into their meals. It didn’t take long, however, for the complaints to begin.

“I think you should put these steaks back on for a few minutes,” someone said.

“Yeah, they’re kind of undercooked,” someone else agreed.

Without the use of silverware or table manners, Steve ripped his meat to shreds, consuming the entire thing within a moment. He stood, flesh hanging from the corner of his mouth, and approached the giant platter. With a smile, he grabbed a steak in each hand and furiously tore in. His animal like behavior stunned his family.

A party guest grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him around. With a condescending tone, the guest asked what “on earth” he thought he was doing.

Steve dropped the steak and fell to the floor, convulsing.

He awoke in a hospital bed.

What happened?

-

Steve pulled his car in recklessly, bumping into his bike, which was parked near the back wall of the garage. He grabbed the T-bone steak from the passenger’s seat and exited his car, leaving the door wide open. He stumbled to the door and opened it, nearly falling over as he entered his home. He made it halfway down the long hallway before slamming his right shoulder into the wall and sliding to a sitting position. He looked at the bloody steak and opened the package.

-

The thing tore into the steak in a blood-fed frenzy, biting into the Styrofoam packaging before finally grabbing the cold meat in his hand and digging in. It squeezed the steak so hard it shred in its hands, the T-bone puncturing skin. Warm blood oozed down and drenched the already saturated gauze pad. Licking the blood running down its arm, the thing took a deep, satisfied breath. It dropped the steak and pulled the bone out from its hand. In an aroused state, the thing nibbled on the pad, pulling it into its mouth. It sucked the blood out of the material. The thing’s eyes rolled back into its head, and its back began to arch. It could feel a state of sedation beginning to take over.

But then it heard a bark.

-

Steve’s dog had a sense of confusion about it. He saw his master, but there something wasn’t right about him. He smelled putrid and his movements were clumsy and primitive. He barked, and the thing looked up at him with fiery eyes. The dog’s tail shot between its legs. With a whine, it turned around with a startle and looked back to see what the thing was doing.

It stood with a hunched back, its bloodshot eyes dead set on the animal.

It leapt forward, and after a short chase, caught the Chihuahua in a corner in the kitchen. It picked the whelping dog up and held it over his head.

-

 The thing brought the dog’s head down hard onto Steve’s kitchen counter, killing it immediately. Blood leaked from underneath the fur, the thing licked it up as fast as it could. The gush was too fast to keep up, and blood poured out onto the floor. It bit into the dog’s soft, warm underbelly. More crimson fluid dumped out, the metallic smell and taste deepening the already established frenzy. The thing swallowed the liver in one go, it slurped on the intestines like spaghetti.

Face, teeth, and tongue red with blood it chewed and chewed mindlessly. Even when there was little but bone left on the naked carcass, it continued to chew into fresh meat. When it paused to breathe, it looked at its right forearm hanging by a few ligaments at its elbow. Hemoglobin pumped from his arteries onto the table and floor. It tried to cup a pump of blood in its left hand, but failed. It wasn’t more than minced meat and bone.

Frustrated by its failure, the thing let out an aggravated grunt and stepped back, slipping in the pool of blood on the tile floor.

It tried to catch itself as it fell, but with no right arm or left hand to support its weight, the thing fell hard. Its head struck the tile floor and died.