Tender is the Flesh

not to have to call them by any name

what is a human but will never be a person

There are times when one has to bear the weight of the world.

The purge had resulted in other benefits:

Owning slaves is prohibited. He remembers the allegations against a family that was later prosecuted for keeping ten female slaves in a clandestine workshop. They were branded. The family had bought them from a breeding centre and trained them. They’d all been taken to the Municipal Slaughterhouse. The females and the family became special meat. The press reported on the case for weeks. He remembers there was a sentence that everyone repeated, horrified: “Slavery is barbaric.”

He doesn’t clarify that she can order online.

“Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

For Spanel, touching, chopping, grinding, processing, deboning, cutting up what was once breathing, is an automatic task, but it’s one done with precision. Hers is a passion that’s contained, calculated.

In the city, everything is extreme. Raging.

Of course, he thinks, she doesn’t know she can.