He lifts her bare belly to his mouth and kisses her. He kisses again, allowing his teeth to graze against her skin. He bites down. It just happens.If he cannot bury her in the ground, he will bury her inside of him. He will consume her in the only meaningful way she can be consumed—not whacked on the head by an industrial dactyl-killing machine, not mechanically separated, not ground into paste and suffocated with chemical breading. His teeth can barely break her skin. He bites harder and comes away with a chunk of her. She tastes of blood and salt, the way all meat must have tasted before humans stole fire from the gods. There is not much flavor to her. What was the point, then? Why resurrect the dead, why force them to relive the nightmare of existence, if they do not even taste of much at all? Why them? Why any of us? He chokes on her. He leans his head back, the way Pinky used to glug her water. Let gravity do the work of swallowing for him. Let gravity crush him into oblivion, if mercy exists. He is caged in by all the mighty forces with all their mighty powers. He begs for relief.
He wipes the blood from his mouth with his sleeve. His gut claws at him from the inside. What he has eaten is already trying to get out. He sits with her body and waits, his nose and toes going numb. Feathers whirl around him in the pre-dawn breeze. He wants to be with her, at peace, but his heart won’t stop. It insists and insists and insists on living. The stupidity of this endeavor. Of the whole thing. Someone will find him out here, eventually. There will be a news story about it; they will get the facts wrong. A confused old man, they’ll say. He wandered off. Delirium, or dementia. Attacked and ate a runaway dactyl. Found him covered in feathers. He prays his daughter will understand. Through the spindly treetops, the sky explodes from gray to pink. Coop waits. And waits. And waits.