But the words meant nothing to me. Kitchen meant nothing to me. All the sunken, skewed tables and beds and chairs and sofas and slanted paintings, stinking of the poisons they released. All the useless chandeliers broken across the pointless marbled floors. Nothing. What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

I let them go. Watched them running across the devastated landscape. Where were they going? The whole world was like this.

The cook and his concierge, the concierge and his cook. Dancing into oblivion. And as they receded into the landscape, the words cook and concierge fled with them, became tiny. Were no more.

With all the murder and the killing and the chaos of warfare, there was little time to talk to my prey. But I talked to some.

There was the artist who believed we were all sacred as he begged me for a ham hock or any scrap of meat and clung to the tattered remnants of his fur coat, shivering against the cold. Who thought us holy, but perhaps not holy enough not to kill. I bit his head off. It took quite a while. He would not stop talking.

There was the woodsman who thought we ate his chickens. He was stiff, like something out of a fairy tale. He could see us only out of the pages of old ideas. Nothing we could have said would convince him different.

We ate him instead and set his chickens free to show that we could be fair and just. Cooked or uncooked, what’s the difference? Do you care?

There was the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding. Setting up his fine-mesh nets full of holes because his brain told him that what the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding, did was set up fine-mesh nets full of holes because his brain told him that what the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding, set up fine-mesh nets. Full of holes.

We sat down to dinner at the bench, all around him. He had not banded us. He could not eat us. But we had seen the ones he’d crushed underfoot by mistake in his fine-mesh nets. We had seen the ones who when they flew off after banding were too disoriented to evade the predator leaping from above or swooping from below. All the instrumentation of trauma in the old shed. The one that might someday burn down, but that was not our concern.

Our concern was the old biologist, sitting there on the bench eating his weak stew, his tender soup.

“Is it good?” I asked. “Is it fine?”

“It’s hearty,” he replied, his face a map of his own weakness more than he knew.