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Last night Madalene and I went over to Caroline’s for a little get together. The highlight of the evening came when a girl named Randy brought over a watermelon. Watermelon is one of my favorite foods, simply because of how fun it is to eat. Randy admitted that she wasn’t safe around knives, and suggested I help her get the watermelon open so we could eat it.

Now, as a little aside, I want to mention something primal that lives within all carnivorous animals. A desire to take something, bash it open and eat it raw by shoving one’s face into it and pulling out mouthful after mouthful of red dripping goodness with one’s incisors. Its an instinct that can’t be ignored. I however, have a little problem. As a vegetarian, I choose not to bash open and eat animals, which are the kinds of things one might think of when they get the urge to bash something open and feast on it. Watermelon however, is a perfect food to smash open and eat with one’s bare hands, scooping handful after handful of red dripping goodness from its center. That is why I like watermelon.

With that in mind, we began to search the house for implements suitable for opening a watermelon. Caroline’s house (which is also Dennis’s house, even though he isn’t in town at the moment) is a unique place of both sophistication and savagery. They didn’t seem to have any suitable knives for some reason. The best knife we could find was a 4 inch paring knife. Hardly appropriate for opening a watermelon.

A little more searching revealed a boon. Caroline is of viking heritage, and as such, owns a few weapons that emulate the types her ocean-faring ancestors would have wielded. One of these weapons was a huge claw made from welded steel, with three wicked tines, each over two feet long and 3/4 of an inch thick. The ends of each tine had been crudely sharpened and firmly welded to the steel hand grip. Here was our watermelon opening tool.

Feeling like Wolverine, I picked up the mighty claw. With one jab, I skewered the watermelon on the tines. I hefted it high and shouted a primal scream, as the others gawked from outside and took pictures. I carried the wounded melon out onto the porch, set it down, and began to jab at it furiously with the claw until we were able to rip it into two pieces. With the aid of the paring knife, I hacked off several large hunks of melon, handing them out to the waiting tribe. We ate well that night, with juice dripping from our faces and hands, and the soiled claw set off to the side, waiting for its next victim.

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