Everything Has Teeth

by Strand, Jeff

  "You're wearing gloves."

  "Yes. I am. Not a good idea to rob somebody and then leave fingerprints all over the place, right? But if I wasn't wearing gloves, you'd see an ugly scar from where my ring finger was shot off and then reattached. Bullets hurt."

  "May I see the scar?"

  "It's unsightly."

  "That's okay."

  "Are you trying to fool me into leaving fingerprints?"

  "No," said Klaus. "You won't have to touch anything."

  "Are you trying to fool me into setting the gun down so that I can use that hand to pull the glove off my other hand?"

  "No."

  "If you are, it won't work. I intend to remove the glove with my teeth. The gun will remain in my hand the entire time."

  "That's fine."

  "Very well." The man bit down on the tip of the middle finger of his glove, slowly tugged it off, then spat it onto the counter. "See?" he asked, holding up his hand.

  "That's one grotesque scar."

  "Isn't it, though? If I'd known it was going to be that bad, I wouldn't have shot off my own finger."

  "You shot off your own finger?"

  The man nodded.

  "On purpose?"

  The man nodded again. "As I said, everybody should experience a gunshot at least once in their life."

  "Seems a bit mentally ill."

  "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm on a lot of medication. Enough pills to stop me from shooting off more fingers, although not enough pills to stop me from robbing stores and showing off my scar to strangers."

  "Well, you were right," said Klaus. "The scar was very unsightly."

  The man picked up his glove, then frowned. "Getting it back on with my teeth is going to be more difficult than taking it off."

  "Maybe you should put the gun down and use your other hand."

  "Wretched trickster! Do not assume that I am a fool, for I am the opposite of a fool."

  "A loof?"

  "What?"

  "Never mind. I considered not saying it, but then I said it anyway and regretted it."

  "Oh, I get it. 'Loof' is 'fool' backwards. Mildly clever." The man waved the gun in Klaus' face. "Don't assume that just because I've made several references to my finger, that it is your finger I intend to puncture with my bullet. It is your head. And though even a mediocre surgeon can reattach a finger with a quality needle and sufficient thread, only the finest surgeons in the land can reattach a brain after it gets shot out of your skull!"

  "Please," said Klaus. "Just take your money and go."

  "Take me to your safe."

  "I said I don't have one."

  "Liar! Everybody has a safe! Where else would you store your turpentine?"

  "You're confusing me."

  "You can't just have turpentine sitting out for some youngster to drink, but yet you can't not have turpentine. Therefore, you have a safe in which to store it. A safe that, I'm confident, also contains money. Take me to your safe!"

  "I have no safe! You'll just have to kill me!"

  "Then, with your permission, I will!" The man pointed the gun at Klaus' forehead and pulled the trigger.

  The man really needed his medication. With it, he was a jolly fellow who fed stray kittens, went to nursing homes to visit elderly people he didn't even know, and cheerfully donated organs to those in need. Without it, he robbed storeowners at gunpoint, and if he'd been off of his medication for too long, he occasionally forgot which side of the gun you were supposed to point at somebody if you wanted to kill them.

  The bullet went right between his eyes. This was good for Klaus, because there's nothing worse than watching somebody shoot themself through their own eye. If you've never witnessed this, pray that you do not. It is truly nasty. A bullet going between the eyes, though still stomach churning, is a significantly less disturbing sight.

  The man's body dropped to the floor.

  Klaus hurried over to check his pulse, even though he knew that seventy percent of people who are shot point-blank through the forehead do not survive. Several chunks of brain were next to his head, reducing his likelihood of survival even further, but Klaus still pressed his fingers to his neck.

  No pulse. The robber was dead.

  There were two human corpses in his shop! Thirty years he had owned Prechtel Bratwurst, and in not one of those three decades had there ever been a dead human on his floor. Now he had two in the same night! The same hour! The same ten-minute interval!

  If he averaged it out, that was one dead body every fifteen years, which wasn't so bad, but still...

  He had to call the police before there was a third!

  But...but what would the police say? It was odd that a man had ground up his own arm in a meat grinder, and then another man shot himself in the face. "This all seems very suspicious," the police officer might say, looking stern as he wrote in his notebook. "Are you sure there was no foul play involved?"

  "None, sir," Klaus would say. "I found the whole thing as bizarre as you do."

  "A man grinding up his own arm challenges my suspension of disbelief all by itself," the officer might say. "If that were the only grisly event of this evening, I'd still raise at least one of my eyebrows in a questioning manner. When you add a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the forehead into the mix, well, I think you can understand why I might be wondering if you are, in fact, a raging homicidal maniac."

  "I understand your reluctance to believe me," Klaus would say. "And I assure you that I will fully cooperate with your investigation, so that—"

  "He's got a gun!" a woman passing the shop might shout.

  Klaus would feel a sudden panic. "What? No, this isn't a gun, it's a—"

  "I meant the officer. He's supposed to have a gun, I know. It just tickled me to see it. I enjoy guns." The woman would smile and continue on her way.

  "He's got a gun!" another woman passing the shop might shout.

  Klaus would feel another sudden panic. "What? No, this isn't a gun, it's a—"

  "Put the gun down!" the officer would shout, grabbing his own gun from its holster and pointing it (the proper way) at Klaus.

  "It's not a gun! It's my fingers! See? I unconsciously formed them into the shape of a gun, but it's just my fingers!"

  But the officer, still unnerved by the horrors he'd seen in Klaus' shop, would open fire. The first bullet would hit Klaus right between the eyes, making the other five bullets that tore into his body irrelevant.

  What an awful way to die.

  Klaus couldn't call the police.

  He'd hide the bodies. Clean up his shop. Remove all evidence that the two men had ever been there. Who would come looking for a drunk or a robber? Nobody. As long as he didn't leave a severed arm or something lying around, Klaus would be safe.

  But what could he do with the remains...?

  Klaus looked at his grinder.

  No.

  His grinder seemed to look back at him, as if to say, This is what I was meant to do.

  What would he do with the bones?

  That settled it. If he had to get rid of the bones anyway, there was no reason to grind up the meat. He'd just have to find a place to dump the bodies.

  Wait! Eighteen years ago he'd received a bone grinder as a birthday present and never used it for anything! It was still in one of the cabinets!

  Klaus hurried over to the cabinet and looked inside. There it was, with the red bow still on top. A BoneGrinder 3000XL. A gift from his late wife. Had she known this day would come?

  And so Klaus spent the entire night stripping the meat off of the dead bodies, grinding it up, and then grinding up the bones. The bone meal he flushed down the toilet, even though it would make fine fertilizer for his garden at home.

  The meat, he kept.

  He wasn't sure why. It should go down the toilet as well. He justified it by telling himself that the police would investigate such a high increase in his water bill, and so he should save the meat to be flushed at a later date.
<
br />   He put the meat in plastic tubs and then put the tubs into the refrigerator. But he did not add seasoning. Not even a single grain of salt.

  Klaus had just finished putting the men's clothing into a garbage bag when the bell above the front door tinkled. "I have come up with a solution to our problems!" Stefan announced.

  "Is that so?" asked Klaus, tying up the bag.

  Stefan nodded. "We will dye the bratwurst different colors for different holidays."

  "No," said Klaus.

  "Why not?"

  "Because it is a silly idea. People do not want artificially colored meat. People want their stool to look the same after they eat sausage as it did before."

  "I spent hours coming up with that idea!"

  "Then they were hours poorly spent."

  "I'll try to think of something else," said Stefan. "You look exhausted. Didn't you sleep well?"

  "What are you implying?" asked Klaus. "Are you suggesting that I had a reason not to sleep well? Is that what you are suggesting and implying?"

  "Last night we were talking about your shop's inevitable collapse, so I thought it might have weighed heavily upon your mind as you lay in bed."

  "Oh. Yes, that is fair, and it is indeed the reason I look so tired today. An excellent observation on your part."

  "Are you wearing the same clothes?"

  "Yes. I slept in them. At home."

  "Is that blood on them?"

  "Yes, but it is the blood of cows and pigs. There's nothing sinister about cow and pig blood in a shop that sells meat, is there?"

  "You're acting peculiar," said Stefan.

  "Burn in hell."

  "And that overreaction is also peculiar."

  Klaus sighed. "I apologize. I did have a sleepless night, and I'm irritable. You've done nothing wrong."

  "And my idea about coloring the—?"

  "Still stupid."

  A young man dressed entirely in lavender walked into the shop. "Hello," he said, "I'm here to purchase one of your delicious sausages, which I will cook up and eat for my breakfast this very morning!"

  "Excellent," said Klaus. "We have a wide selection available for you."

  The man peered through the display case. "This is indeed a fine selection. I can see at least three or four that suit my needs."

  "Which of them shall I wrap up for you?"

  "Perhaps I should buy fifty. Make a feast for fifty of my closest friends! Or sixty! No, sixty would be unwieldy, but fifty would be perfect! That is what I shall do: purchase fifty sausages to cook up and serve to fifty of my closest friends!"

  "That is a splendid idea," said Klaus. "And I will sell you fifty for the price of forty-five!"

  "Delightful! I would like..." The man looked through the display case for nearly a minute. "Do you have any 'special' ones?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know." The man winked. "Special ones."

  "Special how?"

  "You know."

  "With food coloring for the holidays?"

  "No, no. Special."

  "Spicy?"

  "No."

  "Exceptionally lean?"

  "No."

  "Unusually shaped?"

  "No."

  "Then I don't know what you mean."

  "Pork is fine, and so is beef, and so is chicken and lamb and all of the other animals that one generally consumes, but sometimes it's good to stray from the obvious choices, if you know what I mean."

  "Are you saying that you want to buy bratwurst made out of humans?"

  The man's eyes widened. "What?"

  "Is that what you're asking me?"

  "I was talking about ostrich, or alligator, or meerkat! What sort of savage would eat his own kind? You disgust me, sir!"

  "I apologize for the misunderstanding," said Klaus.

  "That said, how do I know it's not tasty? My immediate reaction is revulsion, but that was my reaction to raw oysters, and now I gulp them down by the bucketful. Ended up in the hospital once. 'Too many raw oysters,' the doctor told me. So I went back to revulsion. Still, if you could sell me fifty for the price of forty-two..."

  "I don't want to sell you even one human flesh bratwurst, much less fifty," said Klaus. "It was a misunderstanding."

  "Well, now you've put the idea in my head and I'm struggling to get it out. How do you think it would taste? It would depend on the person, I suppose. A morbidly obese human would taste much different than a slender, starving one. What kind is in your bratwurst?"

  "None! I have no humans in my bratwurst!"

  "Oh, sure you do. Are they athletic? Inactive? Stressed out? I hear that anxiety makes the flesh more tender, although I've never tried it for myself."

  "We really don't have any," Stefan told the man. "I proposed the idea yesterday evening and he reacted in a very negative manner."

  "I see." The man shrugged. "Well, it is a ghastly crime against God's will, so I'm not going to pout. Though I wish you hadn't brought it up at all. It's like asking a child if they want ice cream and then informing them that no ice cream is available."

  "We do have bratwurst, though," Klaus assured him.

  "What I meant was, it's like asking a child if they want chocolate ice cream, and then informing them that only vanilla is available."

  "I hardly think you can compare chocolate ice cream to human flesh," said Klaus.

  "Then let me revise again. It's like asking a child if they want unicorn ice cream, a flavor they never thought they could experience, and when they say yes, you say, I'm sorry, we have no unicorn, but here's some vanilla."

  "Unicorns don't exist."

  "Fine. It's like asking a child if they want human flesh ice cream, and then offering them vanilla! It's a cruel tease!"

  "I apologize," said Klaus. "Which varieties would you like from our actual inventory?"

  "I don't think I want any. Here I was, all set to purchase fifty of them, but my tastes have changed since I first entered your shop. I have evolved as a man. How can I justify such a large generic purchase after being tantalized with the thrill of forbidden discovery?"

  "Sir," said Stefan, "I assure you, if we had the product that causes your salivary glands to spew so aggressively, we would sell it to you. But we do not."

  "I'd buy fifty for the price of fifty-two."

  "We have none."

  "Fifty for the price of fifty-four."

  "Sir, we cannot sell what we do not have."

  "Fifty for the price of...well, fifty for the price of fifty-four is the best I can do, but technically it should be fifty for the price of fifty, so that's still a very generous offer."

  "Look, my employer is not going to sell you human flesh bratwurst, and that's final!" said Stefan. "You can purchase from our existing stock, or you can leave! I don't mean to be rude, but most customers would have taken the hint about us not offering cannibalism opportunities minutes ago!"

  "Very well," said the man. "I will take my business elsewhere. Perhaps Anton's Bratwurst sells—"

  "Nobody sells it!" Stefan shouted. "It's simply not a product you'll find in any bratwurst shop! It's not done in polite society! Human beings were not meant to eat other human beings! They were meant to eat non-talking animals! Even if we had human bratwurst in the back, we wouldn't sell it to you now, because your attitude is shameful! What kind of man are you? It's bad enough when a self-centered man tries to pressure a young lady into parting with articles of clothing, but here you are trying to pressure an old man into committing an act so ghastly that unpleasant songs would be written about him if it were discovered!"

  "I'm not an old man," said Klaus.

  "Comparatively, you are. You're older than the two of us put together. That wasn't an insult. I meant it in a way that was completely respectful of the wisdom you've acquired in your long life."

  "If you two are going to bicker, I'm leaving," said the man. "That sort of thing makes me uncomfortable."

  "No!" said Klaus. "Don't leave. I'll be...I'll be
right back. Stefan, make sure he doesn't leave."

  "Using physical restraint?"

  "No, conversation."

  "Ah. Okay."

  Klaus hurried into the back room. He opened the refrigerator and gazed at those tubs of meat that he was going to simply flush down the toilet. Such a waste.

  Was it right that those two men died for nothing?

  Would they really want their bodies to be flushed away like fecal matter?

  Wouldn't they rather be eaten?

  Of course, if they were eaten, they'd later be flushed down the toilet as fecal matter, so that line of reasoning didn't work.

  Klaus tried to put himself in the position of a drunken man who'd accidentally ground up his arm. Would he want his flesh to be made into something delicious and served to a satisfied customer, or would he want it to be disposed of like mildew-laden refuse?

  The meat in his refrigerator could make fifty people very happy.

  Wasn't the happiness of fifty people worth it?

  What if one of the fifty people was a starving young child, a child who had no nourishment of which to speak, a child whose cries kept its mother awake at night, and this one bite of bratwurst could feed the child and give its mother a glorious eight hours of sleep? Who knew what that mother might accomplish after waking up so refreshed? She could cure a disease!

  This scenario seemed unlikely.

  If Klaus didn't take drastic measures, he'd go out of business. That much was certain.

  He was not a killer. Their blood was on his hands in a literal sense but not a figurative sense. He had done nothing wrong, if you excluded grinding up the dead bodies so they wouldn't be discovered by the authorities.

  Why shouldn't he sell the meat?

  What was the downside?

  What if God was trying to send a message? "Hey, Klaus, I'm here to help you out with your new business plan. Go on, sell the meat! I made it tasty just for you!"

  No.

  But...?

  Maybe.

  But...?

  No.

  What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? What should he do?

  Klaus made his decision.

  He would not sell human flesh bratwurst.