Filial Hannibalism

She found him in the red tide, drowning. Days before, yellow loaders cruised down St. Pete Beach and filled carriages with poisoned fish. Irma Hannibal continued her morning shore walks despite the coughing and throat burn. His albino skin was a spirit in the water, hacking rust. She carried his small frame and rapped her palm against his back, because that’s what she saw other women do when their babies were choking. He bit the fingers Irma laced over his chest, leaving pinpricks. The first thing she did was bleed. The second was laugh. The tarnished ocean washed away her wound like the itch of a bad rash. When it was not so toxic, she sometimes liked to drink the salt water, infusing herself with her home. The vile children two doors down told her whale sperm makes the ocean salty, and she was full of it.
The children weren’t always so bad. When Mrs. Hannibal first moved into their beachside condominium complex, she liked to watch them play Marco Polo and Sharks and Minnows in the pool during hot summer days, guessing which spots their inevitable sunburns would develop by the time they reappeared for sunset barbecues. She left them small candies and play toys at their doorstep, until the children realized it was Irma offering them gifts. They pitched the peppermints and plastic sand shovels at her while she tended to her hibiscus in the mornings, shouting Stranger Danger!
The oldest of the children had turned seventeen the previous winter. He didn’t play with his siblings anymore. A few weeks before Irma found the albino Gator child, she clocked the young man in their shared courtyard ten minutes after midnight, guiding the hand of a young girl onto one of the poolside lounge chairs. He must have missed Irma on her eclipsed second floor balcony, hanging off the end of a Virginia Slim. The boy kissed the girl down her neck, unbuckling her belt and unzipping her jeans before slipping himself inside her well before she could have been aroused enough to enjoy it. Irma listened to the girl’s whimpers, humming along to the quiet mewls as she relived her own first time, twisted in the backseat of her youth pastor’s Subaru while her twin sister, Lucia, kept watch outside and waited for her turn.
Mrs. Hannibal brought her adopted albino Gator child home. She named him Casper, because it was obvious and people wouldn’t ask questions. The first week, he ripped through the closet of babyGap clothes she purchased with her most recent social security deposit. Nuggeted nails clawed holes like fishnet into cornflower blue polo shirts. Young fangs made shorts into honeycomb. When Irma tried to rinse away the saltwater between his scales, he hissed and snapped the fleshy bit of skin below her thumb. Blood bloomed in the bath water, suds rushing to fill the new wound. She didn’t know what to do. Mrs. Hannibal slapped the Gator child across his pale muzzle. He wailed and snapped her again, and she hit him harder. Before he had the chance to retaliate, she folded her pointer finger and thumb around his jaw and thwacked her other hand against the back of his supple head, striking him until her palm was pink and sore. His shrills turned to soft bleats as he hung static in the unsettled water.
She had to teach him, Mrs. Hannibal convinced herself. If he bit others, she might be forced to put him down.
At one time, there had been a “Mr. Hannibal” to Irma’s “Mrs.” 
Milton was as chivalrous and attentive as a husband should be, holding doors open and massaging the sore joints between her toes at night. Their wedding cake was a strawberry chiffon sponge with lemon buttercream, and he resolved against polishing her nose with the puckeringly sweet icing so as not to ruin her makeup. Even on the Friday afternoon of 1973 inside a doctor’s wood-paneled office where Mrs. Hannibal learned she was barren, Milton squeezed her hand and remained silent while she wept. He didn’t speak until later that night, kneading the tarsals of her left foot, when he gently whispered, “There’s always adoption.” He broached the topic again the night he was diagnosed with his mother’s Huntington’s Disease, and she told Milton she didn’t want to raise a child with him if he wouldn’t be around to see their high school graduation.
Milton had been dead for seventeen years, and even if Mrs. Hannibal possessed a working uterus, it would have been out of business for over a decade by the time she found Casper in the surf.
When Mrs. Hannibal attempted to enroll Casper in a childcare facility, aptly named Under the Son: A Christian Daycare, they refused until Irma suggested that they would be making new strides in diversity and inclusivity, and the program could surely market itself as such. Three weeks into Casper’s observatory period, he bit off the pinky finger of a four-year-old boy who stole his favorite toy, a plastic chicken bone cratered with Casper’s teeth marks. To avoid lawyers and police, Mrs. Hannibal paid for the boy’s reattachment surgery.
“Who needs that little finger anyway?” Mrs. Hannibal said to her son, cradling his dispirited snout in her palm. “We don’t need anyone but ourselves.”
Her arthritic hands rummaged through the back of her oak cabinets that hadn’t been updated since the late '80s. The condominium property owners had requested to renovate almost a decade prior, but Mrs. Hannibal repeatedly refused. Behind the cookie press and food mill left by her mother was a vintage cast iron meat grinder, so rusted one could fear tetanus if they nicked their finger on the honed lip.
“Do you know what this is?” Mrs. Hannibal asked her son, presenting him the tool.
“Some kind of horn?” he answered, grabbing the grinder and carrying the hopper to his alabaster lips, howling repeated choruses of echoooo, echoooo through the body. The dense metal made his acute, raspy Gator pitch into something more abrasive. Oversized truck tires on unkempt gravel.
She snatched the appliance away from him.
“It’s an old meat grinder,” Mrs. Hannibal said, securing the clamp to the counter’s edge. “From when I was a little girl.”
“That must’ve been a long time ago,” Casper said. His mother humphed and placed a Tupperware bowl beneath the grinder blades.
“Bring me that chicken breast in the fridge. It should be defrosted by now.”
Casper found the plate of pale chicken meat loosely covered with two sheets of plastic wrap. Mrs. Hannibal instructed him to “chunk” the breasts into cubes, but before she had the chance to find him a knife, Casper pulled the raw meat apart with his claws, leaving strings of fibers and white tendons like frayed hems on jeans, the end result appearing more like carnage than the byproduct of a well-functioning kitchen.
“I suppose that’s fine,” Mrs. Hannibal said. “Remember to wash your hands when you’re finished.” She tossed a few chunks of chicken into the hopper and moved Casper’s claw to the grinder handle. “Now, start cranking,” she said, and when his arm shook and struggled to churn the bar, she commanded him to “Use all of your muscles. Don’t hold back. Lord knows you have more strength than me.”
Flakes of ground chicken emerged out the other side of the blades. Casper paused to watch with awe, pinching and molding the putty-like meat.
“Don’t stop until you’re finished,” Mrs. Hannibal demanded.
She seasoned the ground meat with salt, red pepper flakes, onion powder, minced garlic, and two tablespoons of chopped habanero. Casper grazed through half the bowl of raw chicken before Mrs. Hannibal finished making the patties.
Milton and Irma Hannibal had met in an anthropology course their sophomore year at the University of Florida. On one hand, Mrs. Hannibal could count the men with whom she’d been intimate. Milton was one. Her late sister’s husband was another.
“You two didn’t talk much for twins,” Lucia’s widower said at the bottom of their second shared bottle of Cabernet, flicking his tone into a question.
“In my defense,” Mrs. Hannibal slurred, “I was never very close to any people in my life, except Milton.”
Mr. Hannibal had been dead for six years by the time Lucia caught a vile virus hiking the Andes with her husband in Bolivia. Something doctors called “Ebola-adjacent.” Neither Mrs. Hannibal nor Lucia’s husband were allowed access to her quarantined hospital room during her final days. They were permitted to say goodbye over the phone, staring at Lucia through a window three inches thick. She looked pale inside a hospital bed too inordinate for her wilted body.
Lucia’s widower and Mrs. Hannibal booked two rooms at the Holiday Inn across the street from St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church, where Lucia’s funeral was held. Only one room was used that night. Lucia and her husband had lived in a charming two-bedroom villa on Canton Avenue, which was hardly inhabited considering they spent half their years together on lavish trips abroad. But her widower couldn’t embrace the reality of returning to their home without Lucia’s long-digited fingers laced in cold sweat around his own. The absent patter of ballet flats dancing across their hardwood floors.
“You look so much like her,” the widower said, uncorking a six-dollar bottle of Cab he’d left the room to purchase from the lobby shop. Mrs. Hannibal’s room contained a singular king-sized bed with unbothered white sheets, a television stuck on the in-room movie purchase channel, celebrity voices looping on a fifteen-minute interval, and a patterned carpet that left her inebriated brain dizzy if she stared too long.
“Why didn’t you fall for me instead?” Mrs. Hannibal asked, which the widower returned with a deservingly nebulous gaze. As if she wasn’t already in love with Milton by the time Lucia met her future spouse. If Mrs. Hannibal had a “type,” it certainly wasn’t Lucia’s husband. She would have never contracted the disease that killed her sister because Irma would have never found herself in Bolivia in the first place. Milton and Irma’s honeymoon was spent reading noir novels lakeside at a rented house in North Carolina.
“What do you miss most about her?” the widower asked. Mrs. Hannibal didn’t need to think long about her answer.
“My anonymity.” Mrs. Hannibal didn’t expect Lucia’s widower to understand, and he didn’t. He didn’t ask her to elaborate, and he didn’t wait for Irma to return the question.
“Her thighs,” he said. “She had beautiful thighs.” Like he wanted to eat them.
Twenty-six minutes later, he was pushing himself inside of her, making her sore as Mrs. Hannibal had decided she would only ever feel comfortable with Milton. She scratched his back deep enough to make him bleed, calling it an accident as she smeared the fresh blood into nothing across her bare thigh.
Casper had been living with Mrs. Hannibal for almost two years by the time Hurricane Sheila hit, though she called him five when others asked about her son’s age. He had mushroomed to waist-height on her five-foot-three stature, and when she presented photos of his scaly arms webbed around her torso, strangers kindly smiled and silently nodded as they jawed through excuses to leave her company.
Hurricane Sheila was a Category 3 storm projected to move slow and heavy through the gulf, dumping rainfall measured in feet over the Panhandle, progressing north along the Alabama-Georgia line. Some mild thunderstorms were expected to hit St. Pete and other cities on the east coast, so Mrs. Hannibal prepared by removing the retractable chairs and stained glass table on her balcony, leaving the plotted ferns because they could tolerate some extra water. She filled her gas tank and bought an extra twenty-four pack of water bottles at Publix, though she felt silly because the shelves were still full and this all seemed overly cautious.
The storm made a last minute turn east, picking up gales and seawater over the Gulf before it slapped the Bay Area as a full-force Category 4 Hurricane. Kneeling on the bathroom floor in the center of their condo, waiting for the power to die, Mrs. Hannibal mapped valleys between the scales on Casper’s forehead with her right pinkie nail she kept long but unpolished. When the plumbing quit, Mrs. Hannibal ladled bottled water and dish soap over Casper’s skin in place of a bath.
“Let me swim outside,” he begged, illuminated by LED screens lit beneath half-drunk water bottles. The plastic ignited into bloated lightning bugs, obscuring his features, diffusing any remnants of humanness. Wind wailed like tortured spirits, her home steeped in artificial citrus and bergamot from regifted candles, and inside Mrs. Hannibal’s bathtub were deep abrasions in the porcelain enamel and a beast increasingly taxing to recognize.
What kind of mother lets her child play outside during a storm? How do alligators survive hurricanes? If she were to carry Casper to the oceanfront, surely he would be lost to the surging tides.
The first day post-hurricane was reliably mild, and the children two doors down escaped their condo to revel poolside while residents waited for the streets to be cleared of fallen palm trees and electrical lines. They played tag, making use of the wreckage as obstacles, and when Mrs. Hannibal unleashed Casper to join them, she was surprised to witness their adoption of her son. Tolerance she did not believe they were capable of. Only a matter of time, Mrs. Hannibal cooed, watching the youngest boy poke Casper’s shoulder, his webbed feet dodging the wood splintered off their beach gate. 
The condominium complex remained without power for an additional week, and every afternoon Mrs. Hannibal listened to her son’s jarring wails mingle with the children’s laughter while she rendered helplessly into their vinyl couch, craving her own scales and cold blood.
The first and only time Mrs. Hannibal attempted to drown her twin sister, they were six years old. Their aunt had a backyard pool like an enchanted cove, extending over fifty feet in diameter with an attached whirlpool and miniature slide disguised to look like unassuming boulders. At night during winter, when the outside temperature dipped below that of the heated water, steam brewed off the surface and caught beneath plastic shrubs and palm branches that trimmed the pool. The sisters made believe they were witches, or mermaids, or both.
“My tail is orange,” Irma said, securing a hair band around her ankles and splashing her feet to mimic fins.
“Like Grandma’s old couch?” Lucia asked. She dangled off the metal bar that disappeared into the water, suspended, like she carried no weight. They were twins, but Lucia’s skin developed slightly more pigment, returning the sun’s light while Irma’s pale complexion seemed to capture and absorb it, the antithesis to luster. Lucia’s stomach also held less weight than Irma’s, which pudged and rolled when she sat. This would persist into adulthood, when Lucia’s waist matured into a slender curve while Irma’s remained straight as a knife. Her sister’s hair was thicker and glossier, lips more plump, cheeks naturally rosy. Disparities not lost on any woman, even at eight years old.
“No,” Irma said, “Not like Grandma’s couch. I mean something more burnt. Remember that fish we saw at Fort De Soto? The one that scared you out of the water? Like that.”
“I wasn’t scared. The fish made me realize I forgot to eat lunch. I was hungry.”
Irma disturbed the water again with her bound feet, wanting to protest, but it wasn’t worth the argument. Lucia always won. A droplet landed in her right eye, stinging the jelly with chlorine, but she blinked it away before the pain could settle. “What color is your tail?”
Lucia sneered, proud of the answer her imagination had perfected. “It’s blue,” she said, “but not blue like the Gulf. More navy-ish, so it only blends into the water when it gets too deep for humans to dive. Also, I have the power to control thunderstorms.”
“Can I have a power too?” Irma asked.
“No. You’re just copying me now.”
Midway through their play-pretend, Lucia instructed Irma to grab one of the partially inflated beach balls from the shed and use it to make waves, simulating the ones shaped by hurricanes. They did this by hugging the ball close to their chest and jumping up and down in the water. Lucia claimed Irma’s heavier weight created larger swells.
When Lucia began to choke, drank enough pool water to fill her lungs and sink, Irma did not stop. Her sister’s arms flailed until they were too weak to tread water, and Irma watched, continuing to bounce in the water with her arms wreathed tight around the plastic ball, until only Lucia’s lips puckered above the surface like fish kisses.
Of course, some adults realized what was happening with enough time for a step-uncle to dive in and resuscitate Lucia. They assumed Irma was too young to understand the consequences of her actions. Years later, when Irma asked her sister how much she recalled of the incident, Lucia said her memory was hazy on the details, but she too surrendered to the innocence of children.
Casper joined the neighbor children in their pool and stood on the deep-ended shoulders of one of the brothers, a skinny boy in fourth grade who wore polo shirts tucked into hand-me-down jeans to fill out the waist. Mrs. Hannibal remained silent again, observing through the kitchen window, stationed a few paces back so others couldn’t see her figure in the frame. He called it a game, daring the boy to hold his breath like a Gator. Only Casper’s head and neck extended out of the water, freshly budded adult fangs hanging over a jaw lifting into laughter. The rest of his pale body was a drowned ghost, a chalky phantasm, edges made crooked by the pool’s shifting current. Mrs. Hannibal couldn’t see the boy anymore, only his navy blue swim trunks pressed beneath Casper’s webbed feet.
The boy’s parents never arrived. Mrs. Hannibal wasn’t sure they were home. The other children clustered, each their own proportion of a shared beast, and catapulted Casper off their brother. His back slapped the fiberglass ledge, convincing Mrs. Hannibal that her son’s spine had snapped in half, but he drifted out of the pool, lacking an injury that would have certainly left a human paralyzed. How many animals, were they to also develop advanced intelligence, would surpass the evolution of humans? Casper hissed, not at the children, but to muzzle their taunts and insults. His scales leaked and left a trail as he retreated to their front door, flickering like ivory gemstones, dense as armor, and Mrs. Hannibal questioned which one of them, of their kind, would outlive the other’s time on Earth.
Upon Lucia’s return from her honeymoon, five weeks spent touring Irish sea caves, the newlyweds hosted a potluck in their backyard for all those who participated in their wedding party. Plates of polenta cakes and tobacco-roasted mushroom caps were shared on wicker furniture beneath cosmic string lights, smothering Florida stars that failed in comparable brilliance. Mrs. Hannibal attended at the hip of Milton, an obligation to her sister comparable to her role as maid of honor.
“When do you two plan to start trying?” Mrs. Hannibal asked, ambushing Lucia while she scrubbed lipstick rims off wine glasses, their husbands visible from the kitchen window. 
“Please, Irma,” Lucia pleaded, eyes closed, her words arriving with more breath than command. “Don’t make this about you.”
If there was any anguish that Mrs. Hannibal felt entitled to, would slap her name on like the bow of a ship, it was the privation of motherhood.
“Seems selfish,” Mrs. Hannibal said, budget heels clicking over Lucia’s response, patterned to the careless hands of an expiring clock.
On the three-year anniversary of the day Mrs. Hannibal found Casper, she reserved two tickets for them at Busch Gardens. The park attendants monitored Casper as he jolted through the metal turnstiles, and Mrs. Hannibal squeezed his claw tighter while he left grooves in her spotted hand, as if the moment she let go, zookeepers would drag him to some subterranean bastille and charge visitors ten dollars to observe, twenty for a picture.
Just past the park entrance and before the first theatrical venue, where performers dressed in black leotards and lion manes and phosphorescent painted scales, park patrons roamed above an alligator cove. The archaic creatures lounged in channels, tails whipping around their hulls but avoiding communal embrace, enduring or otherwise ignoring the skins above them. To Mrs. Hannibal and Casper’s left, a small girl with her hair in braids wagged a popcorn bag over the enclosure. Wind pulled it from her grip, dissolving the puffed kernels in lake water. She begged her parents to leap down and join the alligators for their afternoon lounge. Her mother scoffed. “You must be out of your damn, little mind.”
Burrowed among the jaded scales and murky bog water was an albino alligator, average in size and plump around the stomach, with a milky complexion apostrophized by translucent red eyes and pink veins along its snout, like the color copier ran out of ink by the time this beast finished printing. The shedded skin of one of its siblings. The blanched shadow of an elder.
“Would you prefer living with them?” Mrs. Hannibal asked Casper. She stood behind him as he groped the ribs of the bridge’s fence, his feet dangling and muzzle wedged through the slats. Huddled like he was, pale and dwarfed, he appeared endangered. Something unbaked and frangible as eggshells.
Casper removed his head from between the fence stakes and stared down his mother.
“Of course not,” he said. “What makes you think I’m like them?”
For months, Casper remained in his room, refusing to unlock the door, barring the rare meal appetizing enough to satiate his mutating tastes. Mrs. Hannibal quickly learned that he now only ate food with exceptional amounts of fat. Fried potatoes and cheese sticks and burgers cooked rare. Eventually, she began feeding Casper just the chicken skins she browned in hot oil, leaving the thigh meat for herself, also the fatty lining of steaks and whole sticks of butter. Casper’s belly swelled like the albino alligator from the theme park. His feet stretched past the length of his bed. Only the children two doors down acknowledged his absence. Where’s Casper? they asked. He’s sick, said Mrs. Hannibal. Sick with what? Their faces were cast with concern, but there was lust in their voices. Hunger for Casper’s pain. Remorse, said Mrs. Hannibal.
The last Saturday of summer, two days before school began and Mrs. Hannibal would no longer hear the children’s midday laughter silhouetting the pool’s edge, charcoal briquettes wheezed beneath lighter fluid as the children’s mother ignited one of the condo complex’s unwashed grills, gristle aging between the teeth from last summer’s barbecues.
Mrs. Hannibal removed a glass bowl of ground meat from the fridge, shielded with a thin layer of plastic wrap. It was naked, undressed without seasoning and still split in fresh threads from the meat grinder. She located a ceramic mortar and pestle from the lowest kitchen drawer and gathered whole red peppercorns, minced garlic, mustard seeds, dried oregano, paprika, and canned chipotle peppers, bruising the spices into pulp thick like stucco. Mrs. Hannibal blended the ground gator meat with flavor and rolled them into mounds of equal size, flattening the portions into patties and laying them to rest over greased parchment paper. Carrying two trays outside, she presented them to the children’s mother, who stood over the grill with a box of frozen beef patties tucked under her arm. The mother protested, but Mrs. Hannibal persisted, arranging the patties on the grill in a hissing chorus of no, no, I insist. The children resumed their belly flop contest as their mother shrugged and transferred the frozen patties back inside their freezer.
When the patties finished grilling and the juices ran clear, the children dressed them in provolone cheese and sriracha mayonnaise and habanero relish. Thank you, Mrs. Hannibal, they sang in unison. Even the eldest teenage boy, back home after his first year of college, joined his family around the pool.
“This tastes kinda funny,” said the boy Casper nearly drowned. His cheeks were crowded with chewed flesh, chin fattened with grease.
“It’s organic,” Mrs. Hannibal said.
While the children continued eating, Mrs. Hannibal returned to her empty condo, swaddling one remaining patty in saran wrap, planting it in the freezer for a later date. She didn’t want to lose Casper completely. Not yet, anyway. Irma’s bare feet belted the tile in cool pulses that shivered through her home’s quiet bones, unnerving the soiled meat grinder in her sink, which chimed in a leaden choir of sin and clemency.