make eye contact with him. "Very, very functional."
Kula laughs. "Then you don't need to worry. He'll be able to knock you up, little human."
Raiska comes back with his scythe covered in animal carcasses. I gasp, because they are the cutest little animals I've ever seen.
"God! What did you do?"
I look at the dead little animals. They look like cartoon bunnies with big, glassy eyes. Except they are dead.
"I've brought home the bacon," he says, stripping one of the animals off the long pole of his scythe and throwing it onto the ground. "I will skin it and cook it at once."
I take a few deep breaths. I think of all the things I like to eat on Earth that are also cute animals. Pigs are cute. Cows are cute. I eat them without thinking twice. I've just been so far removed from the actual process of how meat is made, that I have taken for granted the sacrifices these animals actually make. If I'm going to eat these cute little rabbit things—and I will, because I'm absolutely starving—I should at least be able to look them in the eyes and be respectful of the sacrifice they made to keep us alive.
"I'll start the fire," Kula says.
Raiska shakes his head. "I will."
Kula sighs. "Brother. You just provided for her. Take a fucking rest and let me start the fire. You really want to cook?"
Raiska shrugs. "Now that I’ve done the real man’s work of killing the animals and bringing back the bacon, I suppose you can do the trivial part of preparing them. You’re the chef.”
Kula gets a big, shit-eating grin on his face. "Hm, it turns out my stupid little thing of making food with real ingredients rather than relying on a synthesizer is a valuable skill that is going to help us all to survive. Anyone who made fun of me in the past for pursuing a useless skill and career must feel pretty foolish right now."
"What is the human expression," Raiska asks me, "for this obnoxious thing Kula is doing right now?"
"Rubbing it in," I say.
Kula grins. "Sometimes it's necessary to rub things in. Otherwise people like Raiska will not learn to be more humble in the future."
Raiska sits down next to me, and we watch as Kula skins the cute little animal carcasses with his axe. Raiska and I gather twigs and dry leaves, and Raiska teaches me how to build a fire.
We get everything laid out and ready to light, and Kula strikes a rock with his axe to ignite the kindling.
Once the fire has started, Kula skewers the freshly skinned meat onto his axe handle and props it up onto two tall twigs that he has stuck into the dirt. The tops of each twig have a "V" branching at the top which holds the axe in place a few feet over the fire. Kula whistles as he turns the axe slowly and rotates the meat. Within a few minutes fat is dripping off the meat and sizzling into the flames. The smell hits my nose, and my mouth starts watering.
I rest my head onto Raiska's big, broad, and muscular shoulder, and I hook my arm into his. "Thank you for bringing home the bacon. It's going to taste really good."
"Only because of my brother's skilled cooking!" Raiska says in a voice loud enough for Kula to hear.
Kula cocks his head at Raiska. "What's that?"
"This meat will taste good only because of your valuable cooking skill!" Raiska looks down at me and grins. "I am being humble."
"You'll have to work on that. You're being a bit too on-the-nose."
"Does that mean obvious?"
"Yes. It sounds like you're kissing his ass."
He gets a horrified look on his face. "I would never kiss Kula's ass."
Kula and I both laugh.
Soon the food is ready. We have no silverware, plates, or anything to eat with, but Kula uses his six-dimensional axe to slice the meat into bite-sized pieces. He cuts pieces off as we are ready to eat them, and both Kula and Raiska go completely overboard making a point to feed me first.
I don't protest at first, because it tastes so good. I've used the expression "hunger is the best spice" before, but I don't think I truly understood the meaning of that phrase until now. Until I was starving on the top of a mountain, running from aliens who are trying to rape me, and eating freshly hunted game cooked by an expert alien chef.
I eat so fast that