If you're interested - Fiction Friday #46...Higher up the chain...

This weeks Fiction Friday Theme : Tell about your character's feelings towards animals and why she feels that way. 
I immediately thought of Amelia..May she Rest In Peace.


Amelia stared at the Tiger Prawns that lay there silently and accusingly at the edge of her plate kicking their legs periodically as if trying, even now, to escape their destiny. Of course they could not since each had been pierced neatly through the abdomen on long thin wooden skewers by Mr Tan. 

She drooled as she picked a prawn randomly from the pile. The marbled blue back of the crustacean wriggled, legs frantically pumping as it made one final and futile effort to flee. 

She smiled and dropped it into the steaming pot. 

Chinese Steamboat was one of Amelia's favourite dishes...the mere act of dipping live creatures into the boiling broth before tasting their searing hot flesh a matter of minutes after their lives had ended both thrilled and seduced Amelia, satisfying her basest desires at many levels.
She salivated in anticipation of the succulent and subtle flavours of the Tiger Prawn which had so recently and gallantly sacrificed its life for her pleasure, before dipping it in Mr Tan's sweet Chilli sauce and popping it into her dainty mouth. That is how it was for Amelia...she loved animals. In fact, she adored them all...fried, boiled, stewed or roasted..even raw. 

Yes, Amelia was truly passionate about animals. 

She had made it her life's work this last twenty years or so to eat her way around the globe, gorging herself on on the mutilated remains of  mammals, insects, crustaceans and reptiles..essential ingredients in any number of  gastronomically delightful regional dishes... and then writing about her pleasure in doing so in a series of best-selling extreme lifestyle cookery books. 

Amelia firmly believed that all animals were either predator or prey and since man was, she argued, at the top of the food chain, it was only right and proper for him to want to eat the lower orders. It was our natural birthright to do so and she considered it her duty to push the boundaries of culinary exploration on behalf of her fellow man. Over the years Amelia had consumed in pursuit of this maxim, a stomach-churning array of barely digestible animal offerings laid out on platters from the teeming cities of Asia to the sweltering jungles of South America. 
A book critic had once dubbed Amelia, the Indiana Jones of food..she liked that accolade and it kind of explains what she was doing here alone in a Western Australian wasteland, on this early spring evening sitting at a roaring campfire by the water's edge jotting down notes in her diary for her latest  book. 

It was dusk...the light was fading and as she scribbled, Amelia  savoured the mouth-wateringly meaty aroma of the small Dingo Dog's carcass which she herself had caught and gutted and which was now slowly spit-roasting over the open fire...almost ready for her to eat. 

Amelia had her back turned to the estuary and so probably didn't even see the five metre Salty as it leapt at her from the water amid a flurry of mud and cracking  branches before snapping its powerful jaws around her waist and dragging her back into the murky water. The crocodile rolled violently under water, tearing off and consuming great chunks of Amelia's pale flesh while as if from nowhere, several others joined the melee..feasting in the churning blood-stained water. After a while, the commotion died down, the water was once more calm and Amelia was gone. 

It was appropriate, and not a little ironic that Amelia should meet her end in such dramatic fashion...passing through the digestive system of a beast older than time itself and a tad higher up the food chain than she had been was a fitting way to go...after all...Amelia really, really loved animals.