Families that eat some of their members. Every so often there’s a case like that: some family that eats one of its members. This time it’s in Britain. In some suburb. So like a functional family with everything set up/all settled, perhaps a tad over-numerous: mother, father, and eleven children. One of them, the twenty-one-year-old, is married to a twenty-year-old, Rachel, who had just given birth to their second child. Their last name was Huchon. At some point she vanishes, from the world, from her family. The Huchons say she ran away, that she just left their household. But that’s not true, they keep her locked up there. They torture her. They beat her with a baseball bat, they burn her with cigarettes, and who knows how many other things we’ll never know because although her body will divulge some information, it is scant, and she herself can’t talk now. This happens in March. They find her, or more precisely, they find a body, some time later on the grounds of an abbey. At first not only can they not tell that it’s Rachel but also they can’t even tell that it was female, such was the degree of decomposition. Oh, and it was wrapped up in a carpet. And then the series of cover-ups one would expect given it’s a family and how blood runs thicker. This slows down the investigation, which nonetheless arrives at its conclusion, verdicts being reached. The most severely punished are to be the parents, her parents-in-law. Her husband, too, some of her brothers-in-law, and, a little lighter, some of the other wives, too, for covering up or slowing down the investigation, I can’t remember all the details. But think of all the things Rachel won’t ever be able to tell us. Of the teeny-tiny amount her decomposed body was able to tell and everything else it kept quiet. Why had the family chosen her, her and her alone, as their martyr, after she’d given them two children. Had they all been equally sadistic? Had her husband protected her or been the overseer of her torments? Could she have run away or gotten help before the final absolute imprisonment? Was she, in fact, absolutely imprisoned? Or just unable to escape? What in her made her succumb to that family and not be able to save herself? The story of those who carry these things out, who perform these acts, who take things all that way. Eat another person to keep going. And so as not to have to eat the meat of their own flesh and blood, they go for the next best thing. Poor Rachel, rotting away while still alive, poor Rachel. Like hamsters, like hamsters eating their own offspring, that same thing, eating your own flesh, feeding off oneself, being/becoming one’s own sustenance.