Michelle Kane

What turns normal people into cannibals?

Do normal people exist, or are we all potential cannibals waiting for the right catalyst?

A teenage girl was asked why she and her friends had started to slice off parts of their own skin in order to eat it.

And she said, I don't know, we just felt like it.

I never met that teenage girl, but I've met plenty like her.

People caught in their own compulsions, driven to extremes of behavior, with no other explanation than they felt like it.

And this is what haunts me.

I feel like doing a great many things in my life, some of them strange or even disgusting to other people, like putting mayonnaise on french fries.

Yet I like mayo on fries.

What's to stop me from liking slices of my own skin?

How much of what I view as moral behavior is merely the product of cultural conditioning?

And how much of that might I sweep away one day because I simply feel like it?

What if I start to feel like killing people and wearing their bones as a necklace?

Will I be betraying my humanity or merely betraying the mores of my community?

And if I do all that, and it feels right, am I still me?

Or have I become a monster?

Are we all monsters, kept in line by nothing more than social mores?

The question for me is more than academic.

When I was 14 months old, my mother was institutionalized for life after she attempted to boil me in a large pot on the stove.

Any attempt to tell the full story of Fire Creek has been stymied by the uniform silence of those who participated.