Good Intentions

A Fine Young Cannibal

A fine young cannibal was walking through the woods and came up on a missionary trapped high in the tree. He yelled, “How’d you get up there? she said, I’ve been up here for two days and three nights. I’m hungry, thirsty and tired. I need some help to get down.” She explained, she’d been there endlessly with a lion circling below waiting for her to come down.

But the lion had grown impatient with cleaning his paws and stretching its jaws while waiting for her to come down or fall. The lion eventually left and there she was up the tree and starving. And along came you, the fine young cannibal.

She asked the fine young cannibal, that if she came down would he eat her. “Nah, I’ve had my fill for the day. No Virgin Marys for me”, he replied. She asked, if he could step closer so that she could step onto his shoulders. With that assurance, the fine young cannibal backed up to the tree to assist her. And as she stepped down gently onto his shoulders, first with one foot, then with the other, he suddenly turned swiftly and snap! With one lightening quick move she was gone, swallowed whole. Only her black slippers remained, nothing else.

There! Eaten! Tricked! Misled by a fine young cannibal. Doomed, damned, she thought! From inside the fine young cannibal she yelled. “That was a dirty trick! I thought you had your fill for the day, and you gave me your word” “Yes, I did say that, but you were too good to pass up. I had to have you, no matter what.” I’m sorry…. besides, if I hadn’t come by surely the lion would have gotten you. That would have been a horrible death. At least with me my intentions were to help you.” She was captured inside the belly of the fine young cannibal and doomed. She spoke for the last time, “That you found me up a tree without any hope, but when I was stuck up the tree, with no escape from the hungry lion, and feeling feint and weak. I knew the end was near, so I ate the poison berries from the tree to make my death to as painlessly as it could be and not from the lion. So you see, now you’re doomed too!”

With that the fine young cannibal sat down under the shade of the tree, and stared at the black slippers and began to pray.

FINI

THE END

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