Barbecue Ribs

 

Days passed while I dined on fried meat and soup, carved bones, and waited on the leather to tan. As I ate the last of the meat and the original soup stock was consumed leaving only the fresher bones dissolving into new stock, I finally removed the leather from the chemical treatment and hung it to dry on a cedar mannequin hand to hold the shape. By now the chemical treatment had destroyed any DNA, the only thing that could possibly identify it would be fingerprints, but I would wear down the finger tips until even that was gone. Now it was time for the grand finale to end all of this.

I went downstairs to the basement and found my captive struggling, starving, dehydrated. He was almost dead anyway, I had been tending to him, sharing the soup with him so he got enough to stay alive, but just barely. He had no way of confirming for me, but I was sure he wanted to die. Today he would get his final rest and relief, but I would make sure he went out in the most painful way possible.

I picked up his broken body and carried him upstairs and outside to my back yard. Here he would see where he would meet his end, a smoker, custom-made to fit him. The bottom was filled with hickory and apple wood chips. A metal grate covered the wood chips, and I placed his naked torso on the grate. I lit the wood chips and closed the smoker carefully, making sure a pipe with a funnel ending rested on his mouth and nose. This pipe was connected to the outside so he could still breathe while smoke filled the inside of the chamber. Those final breaths came in screams, surprisingly loud and long given how exhausted he was, but he was suffering an incredibly excruciating death with nothing else to do but scream in pain and agony. This was his end, he would not live to see the outside again, he was cooking slowly, his body exposed to heat that dried him out. This would be miserable for a healthy person, but after the exhaustion of the last few days and blood loss from amputations, he had precious little fight left in him and it would all be burned out in a matter of minutes. Finally the screaming stopped, as far as I could tell, he was dead. Now I was just waiting on the meat to finish cooking.

When I finally opened the smoker, he looked like a barbecued pig. Even his face was hardly discernible at this point. I cracked the ribs and ate them one by one, and they were actually quite delicious. Next, I disemboweled him, setting aside the intestines and collecting his organs to mashup, season, and stuff inside the intestines. I put the beginnings of sausage back into the smoker to finish cooking. Then I went back scraped off the last of the meat from the bones and ate that to finish my barbecue dinner.

Aside from the sausage, all that remained now were his last bones. I took the bones back to the soup pot to make a final batch of stock. It would take a few days, about enough to finish the sausage. In just a few days, the last of his remains would be boiled into broth and with one last bowl, he would be gone forever.