Spaghetti and meatballs

         A man was cutting down a tree in the woods when he saw a woman by a river. Her skin was light like bone. He did not know that her lips were painted with blood.

         “Why did you stop?” asked his father. “This forest is dangerous. Don’t pay attention to the inhabitants.”

         After a few hours of cutting down trees, the son stopped and sat on a log. He looked by the river for a drink of water.

         She was still there, smoking weed. The front of her teeth was white but the back part of them was stained somewhat black. The inside of her hair smelled like condensed sweat. She had not showered in a month. A fly landed on her hand and she killed it between her palms that rubbed its dead body like a poisonous cream. While silently farting, she secretly ate the flattened fly. She savored the flavor by keeping it in her mouth for about an hour like abandoned gum.

         The son could not observe these features from a distance. He went to her and stayed with her for the night. His father looked for him but couldn’t find him.

         “Where have you been?” asked his father.

         “I saw a woman in the forest and stayed with her for the night,” he answered with a cough.

         She had given the son a disease that affected his ability to cut wood. The infection was so bad that his hands hurt. One day when he was wielding an axe to cut a tree, his hand ached and his grip loosened. The axe accidentally tore into his father.

         He went to call the nearest hospital on a cell phone, but the woman came during the call. She kept screaming to interrupt his phone call until he ended the call.

         "I could mend your father’s injury, honey. Go and rest,” she said.

         She took his father into a special white tent with a red plus symbol outside her house by the river. Inside the tent, she strangled his father so that he wouldn’t shout while she took the axe and chopped him into pieces. She put the pieces into her freezer and licked his blood from the ground like tomato sauce from pizza. She also used some of that blood to color her thick bitter lips.

         The son waited and waited for days, hoping his father would recover. Each day he visited her. He told her that the disease has damaged his right arm until he was no longer able to cut down trees. He lost his job and was struggling to keep his home. She would go to the bathroom and giggle about the disease with her farting diarrhea. The odor of her gas would fill the entire house. Then her unwashed hands would take some meat from his dead father for spaghetti and meatballs that she’d offer him.

         During one meal together, he went to the fridge to get some more spaghetti. His dead father’s head was staring back at him in the fridge along with the head of a dead police officer. He vomited. While he was vomiting, she took the axe and cut his left arm off.

         “Whoops!” she said and then began to slurp some of the blood vomit mixture from the floor where she tossed the axe. He shouted in severe pain and tried to reach the axe with his right arm, but his right arm was motionless and numb because of her disease. She laughed with foul breath. He bled to death and she put his body in the freezer.