The Man Who Chewed Too Much (pt. 1)

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The Man Who Chewed Too Much
by David Tarleton
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Chapter 1

Once upon a time there was a man who could never swallow his food whole. He always had to chew each piece one hundred and thirty-four times before he would swallow it. Even soup, even milk. He was a very strange bird.

So one day, as a trick, his friends connived to serve him some octopus. And not any old octopus, no, this was the Rubberized Octopus of Antitem, created by the maniacal wizard Ba’l’e’whah’p’r. This evil wizard was a well-known practical joker, and the Rubberized Octopus was one of his more nefarious inventions.

His friends quested the countryside day and night, and after many months of searching, they finally found the Octopus in the crypt of the mummified corpse of one of the ancient rulers of Atlantis, preserved over 300 feet underground, near Athens. Three of them died in the process, and a fourth was committed for the rest of his life to an insane asylum. For the rest of his days he would never speak about his experience, but would only occasionally mutter “…the fish…the horrible blind fish…” When pressed about his comments, he would become comatose, and once tried to put out the eyes of his attending psychiatrist.

But the other friends, the ones who never entered the tomb themselves, they ended up with the Octopus, and placed it carefully in the center of a seafood pasta dish they placed before the chewing man on his 31st birthday.

He seemed pleased, there was something about the texture of overmasticated semolina that really gave him a great deal of pleasure, and most kinds of fish merely turn into a kind of paste when chewed over one hundred times, all of which pleased the man immensely.

As he started on his dinner, little did he know what was in store for him...

Join us again for the next exciting chapter of
“The Man Who Chewed Too Much”

copyright (c) 2001 by David Tarleton