{"id":347,"date":"2011-02-13T23:03:03","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T04:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/"},"modified":"2011-02-21T13:29:16","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T18:29:16","slug":"the-last-leg","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/short-fiction\/the-last-leg\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Leg"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What can someone do who longs to learn the taste of human flesh, but is too nice a person to turn cannibal? That&#8217;s the question I answered in &#8220;The Last Leg,&#8221; published in the 1984 issue of <em>Night Voyages<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the interior illustration gave away one of the twists of the tale. (Not that I didn&#8217;t appreciate the artfulness of Larry Dickison&#8217;s image &#8230; but I just wish it hadn&#8217;t been on the first page.)<\/p>\n<p>I can remember writing this story on index cards that I would shuffle as I rode the F train in New York to and from my day job, a technique that helped me create many stories and survive many commutes.<\/p>\n<p>When I reprinted this story in my collection <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/books\/these-words-are-haunted\/\"><em>These Words Are Haunted<\/em><\/a>, I was later told by my proofreader that it sickened him &#8230; so I knew I was doing my job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What can someone do who longs to learn the taste of human flesh, but is too nice a person to turn cannibal? That&#8217;s the question I answered in &#8220;The Last Leg,&#8221; published in the 1984 issue of Night Voyages. Unfortunately, the interior illustration gave away one of the twists of the tale. (Not that I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348,"parent":13,"menu_order":12,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-347","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/347\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}