The taste of chicory

Chicory hit his tongue and warm tingles of happiness touched his spine, delighting the fibrous links of his shell-like neck with hot electrical current, coursing up and down his nervous system.
It smelt strangely of death to him. He reached out again, daring to touch and to taste the frazzled mess that had been dropped before him by Lillian, earlier that gruesome day.
He loved to eat; even more, he loved to eat what she had made, no matter how burnt it was.
“Oh baby,” cried Lillian from the stove where she worked, “Won’t you eat some more food for momma?”
The man looked about him, slightly bewildered at where the sound was coming from. Lillian turned around. Her cold old face was tired, sagging like the bough of an oak. She lived now, only to satisfy her man.
Through a hole in the screen door of the kitchen, someone was looking at the domestic scene. He was at a fair distance but he focused now upon the man sitting at the wooden kitchen table, picking at a charred carcass.
It was difficult for the viewer to pin-point the sitting man's age. All he could say was that he was between twenty-five and fifty years old. For a man who liked to be accurate, this anomaly gnawed at him.
He’d seen this creature before, knew his name was Timothy, but even though he’d once walked right up to him and shaken his hand, he’d left none the wiser as to his true age. His only impression of Timothy - with his raggedy checked shirt, wild eyes and always sweating brow - was that this was a wretched man, an idiot, a worthless soul. Every breath he tasted was a waste of another’s last gasp of oxygen.
Now, this man stood in the long grasses of the field outside Timothy’s house and viewed him through the crosshairs of a magnified hunting scope. He squinted in the bright sunlight and was able to make out a fresh wound upon Timothy’s balding pate. He reasoned that this was concurrent with a wound that might be sustained during a car accident.
This man knew that Timothy’s car was still running on the lane near his farm. There was blood, fur and feathers smeared across the dirt track and covering the bumper of Timothy’s car. The car’s engine was puttering helplessly, its protective bonnet embedded in a tree. Tracks and blood led towards Timothy and Lillian’s house.
“Now you finish that off now, Timothy,” cried Lillian to him, “And I’ll get to cooking up the rest of it.”
Timothy was over the strange flavour of the chicory and had set to ripping apart the burnt flesh with his fingers, then sucking on the tender parts, extracting juice and rich flavours, before tearing chunks off with his teeth and swallowing greedily. Lillian looked on, nodding.
A single gunshot rang out across the fields and no-one stirred much. The wound on Timothy’s head bled anew. It gushed out onto the grey lifeless meat before him and Lillian cried for her Timothy then and tried to put the blood back in his head.