“You could wear a scarf around your face,” they suggested.

Mrs. Sally refused, and from her sack she instructed her servant to take her home.

Next Mister Bettelheim came to see the cannibals.

“Would you buy my nephew?” he whispered, his servant pushing an eight-year-old boy before the cannibals.

“Absolutely not!” the cannibals replied, and gave the terrified boy a candy before sending him home.

Mrs. Sally returned a few days later. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll sell you my nose.”

She had it replaced with a false one made of gold and, with the money she earned, built an enormous gold dome on top of her marble house.

You may have guessed where this is going. The whole village sold their noses and built gold domes and turrets and towers. Then they sold their eyes—just one each—and used the money to dig moats around their houses, which they filled with wine and exotic, drunken fish. They said that binocular vision was a luxury anyway and needed mainly for throwing and catching things which, lacking arms, they didn’t do anymore. And it only took one eye to appreciate the beauty of their homes.

Now, the cannibals were civilized and law-abiding, but they weren’t saints. They were living in huts in the forest and cooking their food over campfires while the villagers lived in manors and palaces, waited on by servants. So the cannibals moved into the villagers’ houses. There were so many rooms in the houses that it took the villagers some time to notice, but when they finally did, they were angry.

“We never said you could live with us!” the villagers said. “You’re dirty cannibals who eat human flesh! Go stay in the woods!”

“If you don’t let us live in your houses,” the cannibals replied, “we’ll stop buying your limbs and go back to Meek. Then you won’t be able to pay your loans and you’ll lose everything.”

The villagers didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want cannibals in their houses, but neither could they imagine going back to the way they used to live. In fact, things would be worse than before: not only would they be homeless, disfigured, and half blind, but they wouldn’t even have swamps to farm because they’d filled them all in. It was unthinkable.

Grudgingly, they let the cannibals stay. The cannibals spread out among all the houses in the village (except Farmer Hayworth’s—no one wanted to live in his crude wooden shack). They took the master suites and largest bedrooms and made the villagers move into their own guest rooms, some of which did not even have en-suite bathrooms! Mister Bachelard was forced to live in his chicken coop. Mister Anderson moved into his cellar. (It was very nice for a cellar, but still.)

The villagers complained incessantly about the new arrangement. (They still had tongues, after all.)

“Your cooking smells make me sick!” Mrs. Sally said to her cannibals.

“The tourists keep asking about you, and it’s embarrassing!” Mister Pullman shouted at his cannibals, startling them as they read quietly in the study.