The child was not crying. His eyes were hollow, the tears were dried and crystallized on his cheeks. He was in his nightgown, and barefoot. The year was 1609, the month was December, and the place was Jamestown, Virginia. The reason there were tears on his cheeks was the act he was about to commit. And the act was cannibalism.
The supply ships never came. The settlers arrived too late to plant. There were no hunters or fishermen among them, even if there had been something to catch. The little boy had been relying on his father to come soon, and bring food and warm clothes and blankets. But his father, Arthur Kirkland, had written to say he wasn't going to be able to make it this winter. That last, lingering hope had snapped like the frost under his blue feet.
The child's name was America, and he was strong. Despite his tiny size, he had dragged the frozen body of the adult woman into his home - a hole in the ground with strips of cloth sewn over it to make a 'tent'. He stood looking down on the woman who had been so kind to him through the two years they had been here. Now she lay at his feet, blue and hard like ice, her once-green eyes open and staring. Those eyes were so much like his father's. A few tears trickled rebelliously down his cheeks, freezing before they could fall.
There were no other options. He and his people had eaten the horses, the rats, the snakes. They had stripped the land bare of roots and grubs, worms and insects, berries and bark. They had boiled strips of leather and choked it down. The only resource they had now was the dead.
America knelt down and gathered sticks from his pitiful pile of firewood. Quickly he brought water - formerly river ice - to a boil. Then the child turned around and steeled himself for what he was about to do.
With a rock, he broke open her skull. Pieces of bone flew and embedded themselves in the dirt walls of his home. A few found their way into his skin, bringing unknown infections. He reached into her open cranial cavity and scooped out chunks of greyish-pinkish goo. Hungrily he shoveled the woman's brain into his mouth, forgetting for the moment, in the relief of at long last fulfilling his stomach's aching needs, what it was he was putting in his mouth. It was thick and rich and fatty, and slightly metallic. He swallowed it gratefully, unaware that the prions in it were even now at work inside him, changing the structure of his own brain. At long last he sat back on his heels and stared at the broken body before him.
The child untied a small hunting knife on a leather cord from around his thin neck. Gritting his small teeth, he began sawing into the frozen woman, cutting out the meat and the organs. He separated out a small portion of the flesh and tossed it in the pot of boiling water. The rest he stacked in the corner, careful to preserve the heart, lungs, stomach, and especially the liver.
He boiled the flesh of the dead woman and bit into it. Coagulated blood spilled into his mouth. He ate greedily, and finally, finally, the horrible empty ache in his small stomach subsided.
He turned - to see the his victim's green eyes boring into him.
400 years later, America woke up screaming.
