Excerpt: The End of the World Gourmet

The next day, Mommy was at the studio when Bella came home from school and Daddy was still at work too. So she had to let herself in with the key that she kept on a clip on her backpack.
She found some rice crispies cookies and poured herself a glass of milk. The kitchen table, polished wood with little gouges collected over the years, with matching seafoam green placemats and a lazy susan in the middle with a marble fruit bowl and real salt and pepper shakers, was littered with cooking magazines, unopened mail, and a composition book. Bella picked up the composition book. It was Ace’s from last year. She guessed Mommy must have been reading it.
She flipped through the pages, reading the titles: My trip to Sea World, my favorite food is pizza, my favorite video game. She stopped when she came to a page titled: The travelling shovel of death.
The Lido gang was hanging on the corner that night. They were drinking beers shoplifted from the Howdy Doody store. It was a cold night and they were getting irritated. They were ready for a fight.
So when the pickup truck filled with the Hanover gang drove by and threw a bottle at them, they all took off running after the truck. The Hanover gang hooted and yelled and drove off. But the Lido gang kept running.
They lost sight of the truck but they were mad now. They stopped running and Joe, the leader, said, “We’re gonna kick their ass.”
“Yeah,” agreed Toby. He was the smallest and youngest, and hadn’t ever been in a real fight before.
Jose laughed at him. “What’re you gonna do, shrimp? Kick ‘em in the shin?”
The other Lido gang members laughed. They were walking swiftly and steadily, and soon they could hear the laughter of the Hanover gang up ahead. They saw the truck parked on the side of the road. Inside the woods, they knew there was a clearing. It was a good spot for campfires and they’d used it themselves.
“Hey, that’s our spot,” Joe growled.
“Let’s kick those motherfuckers out of there.”
They charged into the field and found the four Hanover gangster: Freddy, Bill, Jojo, and Beans. Beans was poking at a small campfire with a stick, and the other three were swilling beer.
“Hey, get the fuck out of our clearing,” Joe demanded.
“Your clearing? Fuck you. This is our clearing.”
The Lido gang rushed forward and fists began flying. Toby was up against a mid-sized motherfucker and felt the pain hotly when a fist struck his stomach and then his head. He fell backward and looked up at his attacker.
“You fucking pussy. I’m gonna kill you and then I’m gonna fuck your mother.”
Toby clambored to his feet and butted his head into the bigger boy, knocking the wind out of him for a minute. Then he dashed into the woods. He wasn’t hiding. He just needed to catch his breath. And he needed a weapon. Why couldn’t they have been drinking beer out of bottles? Their cans were crumpled uselessly on the ground. A bottle, Toby could break and then he could slit that motherfucker’s throat . . .
Moonlight sifted down through the trees and Toby saw the gleam of metal in the shaft. Like a gift from heaven, there was the travelling shovel of death. Somehow, Toby knew that was it’s name. This shovel had killed, this shovel had dug holes and buried murdered bodies. This shovel was waiting here for him. For this moment.
It was partially submerged in the dirt and Toby felt like that fucking pussy King Arthur pulling a sword out of a stone when he lifted it up. He raised it high in the moonbeam and then charged back out into the clearing.
The faggot that had knocked him down had joined forces with another boy against Joe. They had him down, the bigger kids was sitting on him, and Beans was pounding his face with his fists.
Toby charged. He walloped the fat boy with the shovel and knocked him off of Joe. The boy fell over, lifted his hand to the side of his face and glared up at Toby.
“Back for more, pussy?”
Toby felt nothing but blind rage as he swung the shovel, and swung it and swung it. Blood splattered over him, and suddenly he saw that the fat kid’s head was on the ground in one place and his body was two feet away from it. The fighting had stopped and everyone was standing around staring at him.
“Holy shit.”
“You killed him.”
The remaining Hanover gang members ran away and they could hear their truck starting up and speeding away.
Toby raised the bloody shovel over his head.
“The travelling shovel of death!”
“All right!” The gang was patting him on the back now and it was all right. They found a swampy patch in the woods and dug a deep hole with the shovel, shoved fatty’s body in, and covered it up. Now he was worm food. Halfway through the forest, Toby lodged the shovel back in the ground, ready for its next adventure.

At the bottom of the page, Ace had drawn a shovel with blood dripping from it.
“That’s a lot of bad words,” Bella said as she closed the book.