You had to be wealthy to be in the Smodato Club.
The membership price alone trumped the average wage of the country. And the meals were not free. Not with ingredients like these.
Their motto was ‘No Chickens.’ This pun summed up their existence, and their diet. One Christmas they ate a jaguar’s heart, shipped in on ice from the South American jungle. For dessert at a summer soirée they ate scrambled gazelle’s brain and strawberries. Real bear’s paws formed their power breakfast. Sand cat stuffed with aye-aye pate was typical Sunday lunch fare.
They mourned the extinction of any animal, not because of losing another beautiful beast, but because it was one more creature missed off their dining list. Unless of course, they were responsible for the demise in the first place.
For their hundredth anniversary The Smodato Club wanted to push the boundaries more than ever before. Find something that had never been eaten, but that could never been eaten again.
But there was at least two of everything. Noah had not been wrong. The Tasmanian Tiger and Quaaga were long gone.
Then one of their members (who ran an antique bookshop) chanced across a tome that claimed to show the reader how to open portals to another dimension. Most importantly, it described a creature that ran between worlds. One with meat on its bones. And it was a mouse. How bad could it be?
Following the instructions in the book, The Smodato Club formed a circle, and drew a triangle on the ground in chalk. Plates and knives and forks lay to the side, all at easy access.
After an hour of chanting and incense, most still could not believe it when the triangle turned a golden yellow. What they didn’t consider is that what counted as a mouse in our world, might not count as a mouse in another.
The thing that emerged from the triangle was the size of a tiger, with teeth and claws to match.
When the police broke down the doors an hour later, the creature had vanished. All that remained of The Smodato Club was broken furniture, skeletons in torn rags, and plates licked clean.