A method for appeasing jackals

David Rutschman

Make a jackal from the pieces of jackal in your own body and offer the jackal you have made to the jackals that surround you. Sing the appropriate song: Jackals, I give you a jackal / made from my own body / jackals, a delicate feast!

The jackal you make from the jackal-pieces of your own body must be a living jackal. The jackals that surround you will eat a dead jackal of course (they’re scavengers) — but after eating they will not be appeased, which means that you must locate only the living pieces of jackal within your own body.

Most of the preparation for this method of appeasing jackals, in fact, involves patiently locating and gathering together the living jackal pieces of your own body, and usually after gathering the pieces, you no longer wish to employ the method. Usually you wish instead to be appeased yourself — who can blame you really, after all that work? — and you abandon the non-jackal pieces of your own body, living or not, let them drop off like a man who hates his job drops his too-tight slacks after a long day.

You can stretch then, finally, stretch your living jackal limbs with the others, and growl out your own anger and relief and sweet need, your raging unreasonable demands.

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