The Assembly
So here I was, the day of the party with three rats perched on the counter
and a human arm safely stowed away in the refrigerator. Moving everything
into place on the base was a risky operation, especially for the hand,
which wasn't entirely supported by the foam core base of the arm. But with
my natural manual dexterity, a flat spatula, and Barbara May standing by
to peel wax paper off the bottoms of the rats, the transfers were all
accomplished successfully. The rats lost a bit of hair off their butts
when the wax paper was removed, but I stuck most of it back on and, as
they were all sort of scruffy and patchy already, it made little
difference.
I chose to position the rat whose mouth had remained open prominently at
the end of the hand, about to chow down on the middle finger. The rat
whose mouth had closed against my will I shoved up into the wrist area, so
its nose was nuzzled up to the arm. I left some space between the arm and
the rat with the clenched mouth so that that I was able to cut a bit of
the flesh of the arm and pull out a piece of skin to put in the rat's
mouth.
Now, as we all know, a rat is nothing without a nice icky tail, and since
I was going to exceptionally gross rats, I made them exceptionally long,
slimy tails. I made the tails out of fondant, rolled into long strands,
then segmented with a plastic fondant tool. Making the tails at this late
stage, with fresh, soft fondant, allowed me to drape them grotesquely over
the arm and around the other rats. I think the tails really unified the
piece.
While I had the fondant out I also make little feet for the rats. I then
painted the tails and the feet with some paste food colors and water,
varying the colors slightly from rat to rat, but mostly using reds, pinks,
browns, and black.
Now, my composition was complete except for the blood. No severed arm
lying on a sidewalk could be complete without copious amounts of spilled
blood, so I busted out the piping gel and the red food coloring. Piping
gel doesn't really taste all that good; it's just gooey sugar, but it has
a great wet, glossy sheen to it. I mixed some that was a nice, deep, blood
red and put it in a piping bag with a small round tip. I did the detail
work first with this - little bloody rat footprints, and a blood trail
from one of the rats' tails that spelled out, of course, "They're coming
to get you, Barbara." I also made sure to get blood in and around each
rat's mouth and into the fresh wound in the side of the wrist. Then I
slathered lots of blood around and on the torn stump of the arm, washed
the slimy red goo off my hands, and went to look for a cold beer.
