adventures in haute cuisine; or, i'll take the green beans, thanks.

I would like to submit a nominee for Creepiest Thing in the Whole Entire World: the whole, dead, skinless, earless, and footless hare that was, for an extended period of time, lying in a mixing bowl on the kitchen table in my host family's house.

Oh my god.

I found it at 11 o'clock in the morning, which is entirely too early for me to even be awake, much less confronted with the evidence that my host family is, if not entirely insane, marginally demented. I was getting out my cereal. The hare had other plans. I had to control my impulse to retch all over the floor. It was ... defrosting, while curled up like a baby, its little pawless arms drawn up to its skull, eyes shut. The ears themselves were gone, but there were still little ear holes in its head.

As I contemplated this thing (while also contemplating vegetarianism, my own mortality, and whether or not I would eat ever again), my host father came in the room. In a voice that could best be described as jolly, he said, "Oh, that's not for you! That's for us."

Yes. Yes, it had better be.

The hare remained in the mixing bowl on the kitchen table for a good two days, during which I was put on a forced crash diet, because I couldn't bear to get anywhere near it. I got my cereal box out of the cabinet by sneaking up on it and holding one hand between my eyes and the hare like blinders. I did not snack, because snacks were in the kitchen and so was the hare. Eventually it moved to a covered pot on the stove, or so Skye told me; I was not opening that thing up to verify. By the end of the second day, the hare had started to turn a little purply around the edges, and that had made me nervous enough.

Just when I thought they must have eaten it already and we were free of it, yet another mixing bowl appeared on the kitchen table. It was the hare, only the hare in a sort of shredded-pork-and-bones form. Its skull was still intact, but the rest of its body had turned into dark brown mush with ribs sticking up from it at random intervals. The head looked a bit like a pterodactyl.

Today it is gone. Yesterday the host family had a little lunch party, with two of their sons, a sister and a brother-in-law. I can only assume that the hare was meant as a delicacy for this Big Deal Party.

Ever since I got here my host mother has been trying to convince me to eat meat. She has just set her cause back about seventy-five years.

Also, recently I am sick. I have the plague. I blame this entirely on the hare.

Update: I FIND THAT THE HARE IS IN THE REFRIGERATOR. I SHALL NEVER BE FREE OF IT.