“Wow, that’s a fine animal you got there!”

“Where?!”

When I realized he meant Stag Head, I took offence.

“Hunting trophy?”

“Graduation gift.”

“Sorry?”

“My high school graduation gift. From my mother.”

“Strange idea.”

“I asked for him. He’s family, lived with us as long as I can remember.”

“Lived?”

“Well, yes. He is preserved. He doesn’t eat, wake or sleep, but he still watches over us like Jesus on the cross. Here, take some, with a toothpick.”

I held a paper plate out to him. Professor Ranji’s head leaned to one side.

“Cute, aren’t they?” I asked as his hand moved towards the school of beached sardines, smelly and stiff.

He ignored the toothpick I was offering him and picked one up by the tail. The mouth was open and tiny teeth could be perceived like the bristles of an overused toothbrush. With a roguish sniff, Professor Ranji split the miniature fish lengthwise. Every vertebra of the tiny backbone could be counted. Professor Ranji scratched it out of its intended bed with a fingernail.

Mental disgust transformed into a fierce tingling sensation in the zone of my triangle, where my coarse, beastly hairs stood on end.

“You okay?” Professor Ranji squeezed the muscles over my knee to verify their tenderness, or, maybe, to wipe his hand.

I relaxed my mouth and breathed again.

“I’m hungry as a wolf … ” he admitted.

I looked him in the eye. He was testing me. Lawn chairs were the extent of what my mother had lent me for furniture. With a foot, Professor Ranji pushed the cardboard boxes between us out of the way, reclined his scratchy lawn chair and dropped the sardine from an imaginary point above him into his mouth. Quite soon, he fished it back out and deposited it in an ashtray filled with old olive pits, adding to the concoction his own spit.

I remembered the cantaloupe and rose; put the plug in the kitchen sink and pretended to give mociùté’s buttocks a warm sudsy bath.

“You don’t need to wash that,” Professor Ranji said as he came up behind me.

I handed him a knife, with which he scraped out the tumour of mush and thin cancerous seeds which had killed her, and presented a buttock to me on a paper plate. My legs revelled at the sweetness of the elderly scoops, the alcoholic, musty savour of rottenness. I made no effort to hide it, and he, no effort to hide his distaste. His fingers drummed on the Tropicana box.

Although scientific discussion was supposedly the reason we were having dinner together, our conversation was limited to small talk. He asked my major, my age, my birthday. Seventeen and a half cut his appetite in two; he threw away his melon half. Like a ritual, I brought the roast to the table and he removed the cork from the bottle. With his hands, he broke the bread in two.

The slices Professor Ranji cut were ample. They were brown around the edges, pinker, then red and shiny towards the middle, quite similar to my own intimate meats. On a culinary basis, our tenderest meats are synonymous with our weakest flesh. It was hardly ladylike, but I picked up a slice with my fingers, rolled it and sucked the juices out. Professor Ranji did not seem shocked by my bad manners. I chewed his index finger lazily before swallowing the hairy, cartilaginous pulp. It descended my esophagus slowly and painfully. Professor Ranji groaned.