Cannibals
by Graham Swanson
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| Uncanny Valley suggests that things that look almost human cause distrust, not empathy. |
Ku. Ku bit fish. He found it dying in the sand. It flopped and flopped, but with one swoop of his arm, strong from high climbs, he crushed its bones, bit off its head, and began eating the meat and scales. Tiny bones picked his mouth but he didn't worry. His body was sore with worms and infections. His hand still hurt, so he rubbed mud into the cut. He smeared mud across any aching, open wound.
Ku didn't like his kin. Those hominins yelled and fought all the time. They killed his favorite animal, who kept him warm, who chased away the vermin that sneaked into his pot of seed. Then one hominin was sad because he dropped his meat in the dirt. The dirt covered the fat of his meat, and instead of eating it anyway or cleaning it, he took his club and bashed someone over the head, then stole their meat. Sad hominin ate the meat he stole, but then was placed in a hole, where he sat, until the tribe decided what to do.
Ku liked Shima. Shima still had her fur, but she was always being grabbed and taken away by Cle. Cle didn't like Ku. He beat Ku up for not joining the hunt, for not coming to the circle, for asking questions of the elder hominins who remembered the first arrows and the last time they saw the others before they left to cross the great water.
Ku spent his evenings on his own side of the mountain. He could hear his tribe, but could not see them squabble or bicker over crumbs. They could find him, if need be, and he could find them, should he need to. Like during big thunderstorms, or when the Dinopethicus prowled the Veldt. He kept no weapons other than a staff he used to knock fruit from trees or keep birds away.
It was dangerous being alone. But he liked the serenity of the sunrise, and the peace of the flowing water. The sand, the way the light rippled, and when the sun was far, he even saw his reflection. Abysmal and deformed, but still kindness softened the wrinkles and spots where the fur no longer grew. Good. Too many hominins ripped out their own fur in the extreme heat. Some were lucky enough to be born with small patches of fur or less. Still, his large eyes and large nose made the rest of his skull look small under the jungle of hair on his head. When he opened his mouth, he saw a goofy expression in the water. Missing teeth, and scars.
Still, he longed to share this peace, so when away from his kin, he went searching. Sometimes he even crossed to the other end of the mountain, then crossed to the mountain beyond that, and rested on its peak. Then he'd return and share tales of his adventures. Of what he had eaten. Of what caused him pain. Of what new resources lay beyond. Of the other hominins he shared a fire with. He was careful though. He didn't want them to kill all the animals he liked. He didn't want them fighting with the other peaceful creatures he spoke to.
Ku heard the screams and hollers coming from his side of the grass. A commotion so loud that it frightened the birds from their homes in the trees. He took off running and scooped up his spear and bag. The branches and blades of grass battered the furless parts of his body. He smelled blood.
“What terrible consequence befell my strange kinsfolk this time? Why is that stench so potent if they are still at such a great distance from my restful emporium?” He thought, but he could only bark out blunt bursts of hot air and meaningless babble. Then he’d grunt as his mind continued on.
The blood splatter from wood and rock and mushroom smeared onto his flesh. He stopped running. A heavy dread fell over his brow. With his spear he moved around branches and debris to find a dead deer. Several small spears pierced its gut and chest and heart. A pool of blood covered the ground. No flesh remained on its lower legs. The knobs of exposed leg bone were riddled with gnash marks as if something ate it from the feet up. He ripped out one of the spears, It was small, poorly made, not balanced, and crude.
Well, it can’t be the Dinopithecus. I’ve never seen a spear like that. There’s no time to worry about it now. Life is in the way!
Ku sighed and started running again.
Bad news. Cle dropped his meat. He tried eating it with ants and dirt on it but he spat it out. He got angry, stood up, knuckles dragging, lunged for the hominin next to him, took the meat from his hands and began eating it. Yru, who had been out foraging all day, couldn’t sleep because of the infections in his feet and mouth, and hadn’t eaten in days, grabbed his club and slammed it down on the back of Cle’s head while he was hunkered down with his face full of meat. His skull cracked open and a storm of blood showered them all.
In the rage that followed, blue mushrooms were consumed, Shi got thrown into the pond, and snakes bit people. Cle’s kin gathered around his twitching body. They believed the convulsions meant he was still alive. They scooped his brains up and tried to put them back into his head. Yru was in a pit when Ku returned.
I didn’t do anything wrong, he was a thief, I just took what back he stole.
Yru tried to tell them but he could only moan low and growl.
My God! This is means for exile! Yru, what have you done?
Ku jumped on a rock and hurled his spear into the dirt.
If Cle is dead, who will fight whatever killed that deer?
Ku wasted no time. He held out the spear he found. Shima knew what he was. She reached out, her eyes quaking. Shima was not from his klan. Her people died out long ago.
The gnomes! They killed my kin! They snuck into our caves, hid where we couldn’t see them, and when we were gone they stole our babies and our sacks of food! It wasn’t even ready to be eaten yet, it was still seeds! They waited for us to fall asleep then stabbed us with those spears!
Shima cried and screamed at the site of the spear.
The fight was the result of stealing, but this land isn’t what it used to be when we first found it. When we came here the wildlife was gone and the vegetation didn’t grow back. It’s getting cold, let us plant seeds and return when the stars are right.
Ku threw down the scrappy spear and pointed to the stars.
They laid Cle’s body in the tightest space of the most remote cave they knew about. Work had to be done, but they all agreed that they had to leave. Soon the frost would return, so they planted their seeds and filled their pots, and planned to return the next season. By then, the vegetation and animals would return. The curse on the land would be lifted. The one fear Ku had was about what he found in the woods and what it would mean for the land once they left.
Ku stayed behind to watch their land and find out who the spears belonged to. He patrolled the woods, the mountains, the sands. He remained quiet and disguised himself at the nature around him. Once it seemed that the hominins were gone, he began hearing voices. When he approached they’d be gone.
Next we went to the cave where they interred Cle. To his shock, the body was gone. He sharped his spear, and went into the parts of the cave too high or too tight for the others to tread. In his exploration he found networks of caves under their feet. Inside of them he heard the same voices, but never saw a soul. He went towards faint beams of light coming in from slivers in the ceiling and wall. When he lowered himself down, he found no hominins, but he did find bones that looked like the grave sewn bones of their fellow humans except flayed of enamel, cut, defleshed completely, as if licked clean and nibbled. Cracks, where the marrow had been extracted. Then he came across a hominin skull. The top of the skull had been cracked open, like a lid, he lifted it from the rest of the skull. The bottom looked like it had been scraped clean. Tiny finger marks remained. Against the wall he found a mound of bones, and crossed spears.
Their spears were inferior to the kin of Ku. They had no rock head to pierce hide. It was just a stick with a rough end. Not good enough to hurl, but fine enough to jam into a tree for a rodent, or to stick in an ant hill for the insects. They didn't even use rocks to sharpen the spears. It looked like the same nibble marks as the bones.
Ku almost wailed when he heard the voices again. He looked into a dark corner, where a hole no more than a few stones high opened up. He hoped it was a rodent. The eyes he saw glistening, the hard, struggling breathing, a set of huge teeth sticking out of a small jaw. The creature tried to close its mouth, but it couldn't or it wouldn't be able to breathe. It came out of the shadow, moving on its feet and hands. It had a tiny head, its brain so small that instead of a head that is round and blunt it was pointy. Ku tried to speak. A few words he used among the kin.
Ku flexed every muscle from his throat to diaphram. He tried his hardest to make the sound he wanted to make.
"Food?" He said, holding out some berries he picked.
The creature quaked and snarled, then darted back into the hole. It darted back out carrying an infant covered in hair. The creature screamed at the infant, screamed at Ku, then screamed at the infant. Ku expected him to show off the baby so he could feed them the berries but instead the creature went into a rage. The voice he had heard was the infant's babbles. Instead of comforting the baby, as his kin did, the creature began beating the baby against a rock. Ku nearly collapsed in horror. Blood splattered the fur on his legs.
Splat Splat Splat
The baby screamed and cried. The little creature did not possess the strength to break the bones of the baby so he threw them down and began jumping on them. Then the creature looked up at Ku, blood on its chest, face, feet, and hands. This thing, about the height of a swine, squatted down and began tearing the infants flesh off with his large flat teeth. When he realized Ku was watching him, he began offering him pieces of the dead creature as if it was the berries he offered him.
Ku had his own food, he couldn't imagine why this creature would assume he wanted to sup on that carcass, but as the wailing and hissing continued, he heard other chiding growls emerge from gaps and crevices. He escaped and from the safety of a tree, he watched out. These creatures, these gnomish humanoids, began to creep out and scout the land. Once they determined the hominins had left, they began to scout more. However they did not have the confidence that the hominids had left forever or died out. Ku noticed fewer returned to the caves, but he didn't see them from the tree tops he hid on. It didn’t seem like their ancestors could climb trees at all, unlike his.
Ku noticed that they didn’t climb, but they could dig. They didn’t come from the same ancestors as he did. They came from the dirt. They were born as a seed that developed in the raw earth. They didn’t develop empathy because they never held and nurtured their young. They pulled their infants from the ground.
Ku knew where they were hiding though. These creatures pissed and shit all over. It wasn't difficult to detect them because of the growing amount of waste and foul air. Even the snakes began to stay away. So noisy, they scared the game away. Ku wanted to tell them not to scare the swine and birds away, but he realized that they did not care about the long term, they did not care about the megafauna or the hunt. They searched for him to make into their dinner. He wanted to run off to the others, and tell them everything he witnessed. Even if he had to invent new sounds and new words, because the horror he witnessed was indescribable to his limited vocabulary. But it occurred to him that should he leave his tree, any activity they pursued would go unrecognized.
They must have been eating something. He took his stone knife and lowered himself down. He went to the side of the mountain where the kin left their dwellings, and found it covered in piss and shit. The creatures rolled around in it, mated in it, and ate it. Then they would jump into the pot of grain and spill it everywhere just to take a handful before the others began punching and kicking one another to steal the same handful, even though there was enough to feed several. Ku began to hit himself in the head. He didn't know what to do, and he hated the indecision overcoming him. Meanwhile, the creatures didn't appear to think at all. Just steal from the kin, revel in their own feces, then rip each other to pieces and reproduce.
They didn't use their spears to hunt like he assumed. They used their inferior spears to beat each other to death. Then they'd eat the dead body of the fallen. Usually an older creature, or weaker creature, or creature that appeared smarter than the rest, or different eye color or fur pattern. They always scattered seeds around where they walked and never crossed where they already treaded. When it rained, they'd pull a new out by the hair. If it couldn't escape on its own, they devoured it. They weren't hominin kin. They weren't human at all.
In their cruelty Ku saw how they survived. When their teeth were dripping with blood, their eyes opened wide as if sucking air through them. The cones of their head are soft, uncovered by hair,, looking for the rest of the hominins.
The kin returned months later. Ku rushed to find them. He tried to tell them to turn back and avoid this place, but the hominins needed their grains, their weapons, the belongings left back in their caves and shelters. What they discovered was a breeding ground of disease and bones. Ku tried to get them all to go back. He jumped and pointed and waved but they ignored him, their curiosity leading them on. At first a fear took hold of the kin, and as they moved back into their homes, they found things not too different. The weapons remained where they left them, the pots remained where they left them. Shima and her kin entered their home. She now had an infant against her breast. He still had his fur too, like her. Smart little thing, could sing, and repeat the sounds they made.
They entered their home, and come nightfall small creatures burst out of the dark holes, turned over the pots and took their weapons and pounced on their sleeping beds. They slaughtered the inhabitants, took as much food as they could, and ran off with the baby.
The kin then wept and cried over the carnage.. The men of the kin began taking clubs made of wood, bone, with spears and arrows used for hunting. In the past they had run their rivals off the land with these weapons. In the past they hunted the megafauna with these weapons. They would surely eradicate the gnomes. Ku was beside himself in the sanctuary of his hilltop. From there he witnessed the extermination of the gnomes. The hominids didn't just kill a few, they destroyed everything the gnomes touched. They found nests full of bones and blood where the gnomes slept and they pelted them with rocks. If they got close they skewered them.
The hominins would return to Ku and ask what else he knew about these creatures. They liked to hide in small places and strike when their victims slept. The violence went on and on. Hominids pulled gnomes out of trees and clubbed their heads to bits. A big bonk right on the tip of the coneskull caused an explosion of skull and brain. Their brains were smooth and tiny.
The extermination went on for months as the coneheads were rooted from their hovels, and then using their fire, they set ablaze the mouths of the cave. The hominins knew a fire deep within would cause smoke to drift out, but a fire on the front caused the smoke to suffocate the cave. Indeed they sat out with their spears and arrows, and when the coneheads began pouring out they killed so many that the bits of bone would be discovered ten thousand years later.
The gnomes died out that day, but the horrors and war remained in the memories of the hominin.They migrated the Veldt from the ever lasting deserts to the land where there is no sun and the wind is always cold. They shared a sound and tried to retell the story to other tribes. They could feel it in their throat when they talked to their young. The BONE trying to vibrate. Ku took blue mushrooms and breathed in smoke from burning herbs. He saw time begin, he saw the rise of empires, the rise of industry, the ships crossing the cosmic beyond, and finally the end of the universe, and what lay further than that. He could never talk about what he saw, because the words did not exist. However the stories of the monstrous gnome went on for ages, even to this day.
A researcher in the basement of the university dusts off the skulls of these creatures. She holds them, hums as she examines the features of the pointy skull. When she touches them, she feels the primal compulsion to return to the realm of the hominin. She hears stories of gnomes returning as the climate changes and the wild animals go extinct. She feels them emerging from the ground, born of seed not blood.
