This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/-chickenmilk- on 2026-05-21 21:11:58+00:00.

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When cannibals describe how human flesh tastes, they usually liken it to pork.

I was eleven years old when I first tried it and I can unfortunately attest to that.

It was during the COVID-19 lockdown. I was fresh into middle school. 6th grade. Most kids’ worst years of their entire life. And I beat them to it three years early.

Really, it wasn’t all that long ago, but I feel like I’ve aged decades since then. If not just by what happened that year, then by the years following. Aging me like spoiled milk. Turning me into a teenaged nursing home resident.

My therapist says I gotta write all this out from the beginning if I have any hope of recovering, or at least getting a couple steps closer to a life that’s somewhat normal.

We lived in rural Florida, my mom and me. I didn’t really fully understand the intense weight and massive impact of the whole pandemic, and living where we did, our lives weren’t impacted all that much by it like most of the world.

Mom worked her job online anyway, so that was normal. And me? I was ecstatic that school got cancelled. That was all it really was to me. Like a hurricane day. A snow day for the northerners.

Living out where we did, the closest thing to a neighbor we had was a mile away, then long endless farmland and cattle pastures until you came to the woods or another person’s house.

I’d been taken out of school right around the end of 2019. I had just started 6th grade and was already hating it. I felt like everyone hated my guts. I was a short kid with medium-long hair, a chubby brace-face and a squeaky voice that refused to lower even though I’d already begun puberty.

That was one of the worst parts of starting middle school, and another reason I was glad to be out of it once lockdown had officially begun. The bullying. They were ruthless and I’d never heard so many swear words in my life. Never been called so many horrible names before. Never felt so ruthlessly picked on and lonely.

My mom, God bless her, she did the best she could. She was all I’d had to help me through the anxieties that began showing up around that age. This whole thing has done such a number on her.

I only really had this one friend back then. Cody. He was in my grade, but a little younger than me, scrawny and smaller. I felt like an older brother to him. It’s stupid, I know. I never had any siblings growing up.

Cody lived a couple miles away and we rode the same bus to school every morning. The only one that would pick up the kids that lived out as far as we did. I hated getting up so early, right at the ass-crack of dawn. Before the sun had even risen. I’d stand out by the mailbox at the end of my driveway and wait in the dark for the yellow headlights of bus 1697.

He sat next to me on that first day of school, that early morning. I was surprised because the bus was taking routes my mom never drove and going down back roads I didn’t even know existed, the entryways hidden away between clumps of overgrown trees and palmetto bushes. It was a long, long road down to Cody’s house. Nothing but trees and foliage on each side the whole way down. His family was renting a trailer far out back there. I wonder where they are now.

I was totally shocked when the bus doors opened and he made his way all the way to the seat I was in and plopped right next to me. First thing I noticed about him was the faint smell of cigarettes that came off his clothes. His head was shaved, completely buzzed almost to the skin. It was jarring. He smiled at me and I thought I could see every single one of his teeth. The two in the front overlapped one over the other.

“Sup, fucker,” he said in a voice equally as squeaky as mine.

I blinked for a moment, “What’s up?”

“Wanna see somethin’ sick?” He pulled his thin backpack up onto his lap. It looked empty but he opened the front zipper so I could see inside. It was full of broken pencils and dust and a few pens and markers. He pointed at something that looked like a black marker to me. The sun had come up a bit at this point so I could see it decently. He stuck it in his mouth and the end of it lit up in a little blue circle. He blew quickly and when I saw smoke I panicked.

He laughed like a maniac when I started swatting at the air, hoping it would dissipate before the bus driver saw.

“Dude, stop. You’re gonna get us in trouble!”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Took it from my dad’s girlfriend.” He snickered again.

“You need to get rid of that, dude,” I told him, cautiously eyeing the driver through the rearview mirror. I really didn’t want to be around him if he was gonna vape again. My mom would kill me if she found out.

“Stop being a little bitch,” he sighed and put it back in his bag. “Got a name, pussy?”

I don’t know how we ended up becoming such close friends. You’d never think it, we were polar opposites. But I enjoyed hanging out with the guy. Pretty soon we started hanging out at his place more and more often. My mom hated driving me down there, but I convinced her.

His house was always a mess, his parents never around. Reeked of cigarettes and dog piss. There were always little chihuahuas and kittens scuttling around the house and I never felt clean for a minute while I was there, but his family treated me nice enough when I did see them. It wasn’t hard to see where he’d gotten his quirks from once I’d met them.

Like I said, his house was super far out there, behind it was woods. There was a swampy creek Cody and I would go to on weekends and sit and talk for hours about dumb shit. Girls and movies. We’d throw rocks at the birds in the trees. The creek was brown with tannins and there was no way we were gonna swim. Wasn’t deep enough anyway.

We didn’t start hiking that far out there until lockdown and we were out of school for so long. There was no getting us to do our schoolwork on the computers, we could not have cared any less. I guess I picked that up from him eventually.

When we ran into the guy, it had been getting late, later than we usually would stay out.

I had planned to sleep over at his house. All my stuff was there that afternoon. My mom wasn’t pleased with me always being around him and his family but I guess she gave in since he was the only kid at school I’d seemed to get along with. I always smelled like cigarettes after staying at his place.

I think that day we had been watching the “Stephen King’s It” 1990 miniseries. He had an old Walmart DVD we put in his Xbox to watch. The one you had to flip upside down to watch part two. It was the kids building a dam in the barrens that made us want to go out that afternoon. I guess we thought we’d do the same to that old creek.

Once we were out there we wasted a good long while looking for stuff to make a dam but quickly realized we had no idea how to do that with just sticks and palmetto leaves as our tools. We instead opted to shooting off bottle rockets at the birds in the trees. They were those little green parakeets that are invasive. Usually we’d get an old beer bottle and light them while running away laughing but this time we had a different idea.

Cody had brought an old thin PVC pipe and we took turns lighting the rockets inside and aiming it at those birds like our own makeshift gun. It was pretty damn fun. We never actually hit the birds, they flew away too fast and the loud pop was enough to scare the rest away for a bit while we “reloaded”.

We kept doing that until Cody lit one too close to his body and it burned a hole straight through his shirt.

“Ah fuck!”

He dropped the pipe and it dipped down into the water, the bottle rocket sputtering and bursting below.

“What? What happened?” I said.

Cody showed me his white t-shirt. There was a burned hole in it and the skin underneath was red.

“It’s okay man, you’ll live.”

“It hurts like a motherfucker.”

“Don’t be a bitch, remember?”

He shot me a middle finger but I saw that smile underneath. It was dusk now. Getting darker by the minute. I looked up at the sky. The cicadas were overpowering.

I put my hand out for Cody to take. He did and I pulled him to his feet. He made a face and scrunched up his nose.

“Dude, did you shit yourself?”

“What?”

“What the hell is that smell?”

“You’re one to talk.”

“No, I’m serious. It reeks dude.”

I didn’t really smell anything, but I did hear something. It was really odd. A creaking sound. Not like the trees swaying, like someone was drawing with a dry-erase marker but pressing down really hard.

Cccrrruukk ccrruuuukk cccruuukkkk

It was faint, under the cacophony of bugs, but definitely there.

Cody wiped a hand across his nose, “I dunno. Let’s just get the fuck back to–”

Then the most bizarre thing happened. A voice, soft and slurred, came from the bushes. Sounded like someone trying to talk with a swollen tongue.

“Figgyyyy….”

Both of us started looking around frantically for the source of the voice. The creaking was back now.

Crrrruukk cruuukkk ccrrrrukkkkkkk

When I finally saw him my heart dropped.

You know how when you wake up in the middle of the night and you see a pile of clothes or a coat hanging up, and for a split second your heart stops because it looks just like a person? That’s what I felt when I saw the guy, except it wasn’t a clump of trees. It wasn't an empty coat.

It was a man.

An enormous man. His face was shrouded in shadow and the creaking sound was coming from him. From his mouth.

Ccrrrruukk crrukkkk crruuukkk “Figgyyyy….” cccrruukk crukkkk–

“Du...

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