Tonight El Chupacabra Eats Someone's Baby

Descending the hills on its way to town, the chupacabra is in transition.  As it moves, propelled by hunger, it forgets its fearfully cautious nature and assumes an aggressive boldness.  It's getting pumped up, if you will, psyched.  It becomes ferocious.

The loathsome beast spends most of its life hiding from the world of man, shivering and starving in the wilderness, terrified at the treatment it instinctively knows it would receive at the hands of civilization.  It spins in circles biting at its hindquarters and tail; its fur's in tatters wherever its jaws can reach.  The bald patches, along with the lesions over much of its body, give it the appearance of spots.  (Well, actually, I suppose the appearance of spots *is* spots.)

It lives its life in lonely isolation.  But a couple of times each month, on nights like tonight, it must eat.  And so it comes to town to find a baby, which, to the chupacabra, is the only delicious thing.  Whose baby will it eat?

Whose baby is it?  Do individuals belong to themselves?  Autonomy's supposed to be so great so perhaps they do but, still, it's hard to say that if we leave aside the baby itself then nobody's baby has been eaten when a baby gets eaten.  It was somebody's baby.  The chupacabra just ate somebody's plump and juicy little baby!  The parents, the state, the community, the tribe, the church...?

Personally, I think a baby is the baby's generation's baby.  After all, those are the people with whom it's going to spend the most time (or with whom it would have spent the most time, as the case may be).  Time spent is pretty much what life's all about, and so perhaps it is our contemporaries to whom we belong.  The great thing about this theory is that we're all babies when we lose our babies, and so it doesn't impact us emotionally because we never remember it...we didn't even know it was happening at the time. Babies have no idea what's going on.

It's important to recognize, though, that getting eaten by a chupacabra is not a "victimless crime."  The victim, of course, is the baby who was eaten.  That baby loses everything.  The chupacabra may have never injured us personally, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't despise it.  It is a despicable thing.