Human beings are funny. All the time, they're funny. The things they say are funny. Do you know that some human beings say that a vegetarian is someone who never heard a carrot scream? That's funny. Isn't that funny? I think it's funny.

I hear the carrots scream. I hear them very clearly. I bite them, and I listen for their scream, and if you could hear it I think you would want to hear it again. There's something wonderful in that keening little wail. And not just the carrots! Every kind of plant has a moan of its own. Believe me. You have no idea how much anguish a vegetable can put into its final cries.

Naturally, the vegetables don't think it's very funny at all.

Could I describe the sound? It's like the noise that Harold makes when he's sad, only more so. And it seems to echo into infinity, fainter and fainter, like it's going down into a long, long tunnel. Sometimes when things are very calm I think that I can still hear the screams of bygone produce from weeks, months, years gone by, lingering in my ears. It lulls me to sleep if I let it.

Am I cruel, would you say? The alternative is worse. Don't you think? I think so. I know so. Sometimes I'll listen by the table while the human beings eat and there will be a symphony of screams wafting beneath their funny noses and over their funny conversations. They talk and talk and talk about nothing at all, and they tear the lingering life out of a thousand helpless screaming things.

How awful it must be for them, the things, to howl and to shriek with all their tiny hearts, while their murderers couldn't possibly care less. Isn't that funny? How would you feel, watching yourself be picked apart, gnashed and torn and sucked out of yourself, your innards made outers and your hair and skin and nails and bones slurped up by a great big mouth that's halfway through a word that's halfway to being forgotten forever? Pouring every last feeling you can muster, all your sadness, all your rage, all your disappointment and pity and desperate, lonely agony into one last scream. Wouldn't you want to be heard?

And let's not forget… many humans don't even LIKE vegetables. Eating them is nothing less than a chore. How cruel is that, do you think? Can you imagine a worse fate? Torn apart by irresistible, incomprehensible forces, and being HATED for it! Because they would much rather be tearing apart something else, thank you very much. That's funny.

Chester kills little things now and then, and he enjoys it. Birds or mice or chipmunks, he plays with them like it's a wonderful game. And good for him. At least someone gets to be happy during his meals.

The human beings don't think about the little souls of the plants they pick. They don't hear the songs the vegetables sing to one another and to the wind as they blossom with such joy in the sunny fields, never knowing that they're trapped in an abattoir. Human ears are deaf to the yelps of pain and surprise as those songs are interrupted, the fear as their victims are hauled away, and the prayers, oh, the prayers, as the captives slowly begin to rot. I even hear them in the Cold Box, their songs slowed to a pathetic funereal dirge as the inmates commune with one another as best they can, hoping for some reprieve, some way back to their roots and their families and the Earth, dying cell by cell. Some of them manage to spoil quickly enough to earn an escape from a meaty mouth, and they're tossed away to a compost heap where they exhale a lasting, mournful sigh of relief.

Most, however, are not so lucky. The freezing blackness is efficient, and they keep enough life in them to be of nutritional value when they are taken from the Box and put onto a plate. Though between the box and the plate they are very often boiled, mutilated, or disfigured in some hideous way. The human beings chide Chester for playing with his food, but his methods of torture are a taste of paradise compared to cooking.

Still, this is not unforgivable, for human beings are ignorant. What about me? Am I not worse? Because, you may say, I hear the screams and yet I continue to feast! Ah, but we all must feast on something. I pierce the flesh of my prey without a shred of guilt. I am a great mercy to them, for in my company there is no freezing, no cooking, no distaste. I steal them away and cradle them and convey that they are the most important things in the world to me. They are the Blood. They are the Life. And as I gently devour them I give audience to their screams, and not a one of them dies alone.

That's why their ghosts haunt the human beings instead of me. They know who the real monsters are. Oh, wouldn't the people find it funny if they knew how much of their subtle misfortune was due to the wrathful specter of a pea or carrot devoting its energy to some tiny act of revenge? And sometimes a stroke of bad luck leads from one thing to another, a small stumble becomes a great fall, and before long a human being's entire life has been ruined to satisfy the quiet vengeance of a vegetable.

Isn't that funny? I think it's funny.

Author's Note: Bunnicula's book was a staple of my childhood, and I always remember it fondly. I was pleasantly surprised to discover he was recently been reincarnated in cartoon form! And not half bad, either. I found his revitalized character delightful, reminiscent of old Warner Brothers shorts, the sort of playful demon who treats everything as a funny sort of joke. But also genuinely frightening, in his way... he'll play games, but you can't shake the feeling there's a touch of real evil behind those eyes.

So I was inspired to write something up for him, just a drabble trying to capture the dark humor that I imagine lurks in his little heart. You can attach this to either the book or the cartoon, I'd like to think it can apply to either.

Incidentally, the title was inspired by lines from Mel Brooks' "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," one of my favorite adaptations out of all of them. No accounting for taste, eh? Love it or leave it, but like Bunnicula it's something that comes off as a joke but carries a slight undercurrent of actual darkness.

And speaking of movies, you might think I was also inspired by "Sausage Fest." But no... any similarity is purely coincidental.