SWEETBREADS by Christina Milletti
August 10, 1997
From the will of Joachim van Hoeckel
I bequeath my estate to that so--called novelist, Oskar Heck, whose accomplishments amount to little else but wasted time with ink and ribbon, pages banged out on a typewriter he salvaged from my attic. As I have no other suitable heir, the lot is his – with one proviso: Mr. Heck may secure my savings if he agrees to serve a three--month term as sole manager of Hoeckel’s Meats (647 Bevel Street, Hoosick Falls, NY). I am fully aware that Mr. Heck has no interest in the butcher business (see attached letter of 3/12/95).1 Yet it seems only fair that he operate the store which, after years of toil, generated what amounts to my life savings, a modest estate. If Mr. Heck completes his managerial term without assistance (without advisors, consultants, counter and office employees) much as I did, and does not run the business into the ground (forecasted margin of error is +/- 6% of 1997 taxable income) he may without penalty inherit my estate. During the three--month period, he will be afforded an allowance and enjoy full access to my home. At the conclusion of his term, my lawyers will evaluate his record.
¹Father,
I will not be a butcher.
You cannot make me butcher.
OvH
September 1, 1997
Oskar found the note at dawn. The slip of folded paper had been carefully worked into the door of the shop so it wouldn’t flutter away on the breeze. The paper was crisp and white. Slick, he noted. Wax paper. The words were written neatly in pencil, but the lead had only imprinted the wax. He had to tilt the note in the glare of the lightbulb in order to read what it said.
“Oskar,” it read, addressing him by name as though the author knew him, “come to the convent at dawn. Drop off the package on the porch, in the bin in the corner (you can’t miss it), just like your father always did.” There was no salutation. The writer had simply signed the letter “Sr. Joan Mary of the Immaculate Heart.”
Oskar had never met a Sister Joan, although he knew the Convent well. When Oskar was ten, he had been enrolled in their school (the only boy among halls of girls). It was a busy, unsettling year. His family had moved from Austria just a few months after his mother died from an unknown wasting illness: his father had sold his shop, their home, gave his mother’s cat to a neighbor. With little warning, Joachim had moved his son and his business – all that he had – from Vienna to New York.
Now, at the age of thirty--four, Oskar unlocked the door to his father’s shop. He was a virtual stranger; he couldn’t remember the last time he stood at the counter or rested his hands on the register’s keys – nor what he said the last time he spoke to his father in person. Ten years had passed: by now, there were few people in Hoosick Falls who would recall he was his father’s son. Oskar had put on weight, he’d moved away. He had even changed his name.
September 2, 1997
Morning
Not long before dawn, Oskar rolled out of bed, tugged his boots on, and made his way to Bevel Street to prepare the Sisters’ package much as his father had for twenty years. First, he awaited the delivery of freshly slaughtered stock. Then, as his father once taught him, Oskar began secondary slayings, carving the new carcasses into roasts, ribs, and steaks. He followed his father’s methods precisely: purchasing an animal split by the dealer, then slicing up the beast himself. Bones, his father often had told him, they’re the key to texture and flavor. Pre--packaged meats? (He’d scoff, shake his head.) Joachim refused to sell them at the store.
Oskar was ten when his father opened the butcher shop in a neighborhood on the fringe of town where the rents were more affordable. At the time, the shop was small. Joachim specialized in sweetbreads: livers, tongues, brains, and eyes, gonads and intestines. Organs which the town market never had on hand. The first day the shop was opened, their patrons seemed to arrive like hounds. Nose up. Following the scent of fresh blood on the breeze. Taking Joachim aside, they quietly admitted that for years they had had to quell the urge for viscera of beast and fowl alike. Abstain from thoughts of satisfaction by reigning in the carnivores inside them.
To all of this, Joachim sighed and nodded; he could be eminently reassuring when a profit was at stake. Even when the Reverend Mother first came to call on them, he provided her with service un-expected in a man who parsed steer – not unlike grammar – into proper parts. He didn’t tell her that he had no god, that blood had -become his bond, almost a religion. “It’s in fish and bugs, in beasts and men,” he’d say. It was shared, it could be shared: Joachim bent his head at every meal to honor the blood he spilled.
“Mr. van Hoekel?” The Reverend Mother’s flat, inquisitive face was pinched as she ignored Oskar at the register and leaned across the counter.
“I have a proposition for you,” she went on when Joachim emerged from behind the butcher’s block, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. Without flinching, she shook his hand when he offered it, and they went together to his office. How tough she was. Sturdy, Oskar thought. Built equally from fat and muscle. Knocking cases with her broad, square flanks as she made demands. They spoke for over half an hour. And in the end, they shook hands one more time: Joachim had agreed to donate a weekly ration of meat – as much as the Sisters required – in exchange for prayers for his dead wife and his only son’s education.
“It’s a bargain,” he told Oskar. And then went back to work.
Soon after, young Oskar was admitted to the convent school. He wasn’t unwelcome – there were so many things a boy could do while the girls went to study hall. Oskar’s lone pair of pants in fact rarely garnered attention among the crowded skirts of his peers: their sights were set outside the gates at the boys who gathered after school, not the queer egg who hatched among them. Certainly, the girls were kind. But most often Oskar sat alone. He knew there was talk among them about the scent of dried blood that clung to him – a stale perfume, like history – that he simply couldn’t shake. He tried soaps and creams. And when those failed, onion skins and garlic. In the end, the girls ignored the smell by ignoring him. But they always blamed him for the heavy vapor of simmered meat that greeted them each morning: it rose from the convent’s kitchen as they arrived for class each day, the scent filtering through a maze of vents – into classrooms and confessionals, inside lockers, throughout the gym. By 9:00 a.m. the air was thick with the Sisters’ lunch of roasted pork. Sausage stew. Soft, over--boiled potatoes. Twenty years later, Oskar still associates the thought of open books with the smell of bloated, bursting meat cooking over a flame.
August 7, 1997
A Eulogy for Himself by Himself
Joachim van Hoeckel ran his butcher shop in Hoosick Falls just like his old store in Vienna. He had rules, maxims, and he kept to them. Then he taught them to his son. 1.) Never let a dealer bone your meat. 2.) Always make your cuts yourself. 3.) Only buy fresh fowl. Stretched side by side, the birds arrived in cardboard boxes naked of their feathers. Rabbits turned up the same way. Then into the shop’s cold case, they went together: prime grade meats of beef, lamb, goat – and pig, from hoof to snout.
Joachim had expectations and he met them. Though occasionally, when no one looked, he used his thumb to tip the shop’s scales to his favor – a gentle list and pull was enough to do the trick. Yet Joachim never overcharged his clients by more than an eighth. Even in deceit, he was as modest as a working man ought to be.
For twenty years, Joachim kept his promise to the Convent, long after Oskar earned his degree, left him, left home, even left the store. Mostly, he sent them pork butt (pig shoulder the nuns preferred to call it). Intestine casings. Sweetbreads. These too he sent. Never lipid cuts. In fact, in all that time, only a few deliveries had been second--best – tallow or perhaps over--tough – and those he’d ground up for them, spicing the meat heavily with sea salt, basil, and fresh peppers: “a specialty,” he said. If the Sisters noticed, they never complained. Not even when Joachim began to charge for intestine casings after -Oskar passed his last exam. The gut was expensive, after all. And Joachim worked it by hand himself. Stripping the intestine of its lining, he made sure the cleaned, trimmed casings were bound securely, delivered moist. The casings rarely burst: it was unusual, even, to find lethal pinpricks in them through which their contents could spill out.
September 2, 1997
Still Morning
Oskar walked quickly to the Convent, heaved the package against his hip the way he’d hold a child, giving it time to adjust – flesh on flesh – just like a tiny body would. He had forgotten that at dawn even a small town isn’t silent: he could hear trucks roaring on Route 7 out from Albany or perhaps back from Vermont, his own soles scuffing pavement; even the dim twitter of birds in nests. Already the town was humming. Yet when Oskar turned up the Convent’s drive, the world suddenly seemed to go silent. Old enormous evergreens shrouded the building from the street.
The Convent of the Immaculate Heart was a fierce and stately structure. The pendant was supported by four thick columns behind which two massive iron doors (drawn by an old winch and chain) opened up into a foyer with a marble chapel just beyond. The Sisters’ rooms were located on the upper floors designed, like a horseshoe, to wrap around the first--floor chapel, so that, while the faithfuls’ souls were trained inward, their windows faced out on the drive. Oskar was careful to be quiet as he made his way up the front steps to the landing, each breath soft, hushed, though he was winded by his quick pace at dawn. As promised, he found the metal hamper to which Sister Joan referred. The lid squeaked as Oskar pried it up. Protested a second time as he left pork and sausage casings, a large roast, inside.
Oskar hovered by the bin, wondering, as he hesitated, if he ought to ring the bell, if he ought to wait for Sister Joan. He paused. He listened for her. He was unable to shake the old schoolboy memory that, just inside, the corridors were filled with habits. That legs in thick stockings were bent in prayer. Or had just then been roused from sleep.
Shrugging, Oskar left, walked back down the steps. He had reached the drive when a small, seamless door cut within the massive entrance soundlessly swung inward, and an abundant woman sidestepped out, squeezing herself with effort through the tiny frame. Though large, she moved swiftly – she reached the bin before Oskar could take one stride toward her – growing smaller with each step, as though the fresh air had made her shrink. She didn’t turn, she didn’t even trouble to acknowledge him though he knew, without quite knowing how, that she knew he was there. Against her dwindling body, the packages looked enormous, nearly seemed to topple her. But once back inside the Convent, she seemed to grow large again; her body patched the tiny door, the little light that glowed inside the hall. When she turned, stooping slightly – perhaps to grab the bolt? – Oskar was afforded one glimpse of her white face, the white lips pursed together, bangs of brown hair straying out beneath her veil. Without haste – all her movements were efficient – she slipped the seamless doors together. Silently, the latch snapped back in place.
March 23, 1979
Childhood
In spring, Bevel Street is dry and cool. Guided by the steep façades of the 19th century brick townhouses (by then already converted into new apartments, eateries, and novelty shops), the breeze that blows up from the dim waters of the Hudson pulses along the entire street. Drinks in hand, seniors sit on stoops all day, dealing cards on plastic tables. Children bat balls with long sticks. And shoppers roam in and out of stores like Hoeckel’s Meats as they walk home from work.
That the Hoeckels lived on Bevel Street was both a source of angst and pride for sixteen--year--old Oskar, an immigrant in a town of old New Yorkers whose roots were so obscured by time they no longer knew who they once were and resented newcomers for their memories. Yet it wasn’t because of his accent that Oskar often found himself sport for the local bullies. It was his place at the Convent school, as though his proximity to a flock of women made him doubly strange, and they could sense a soft German girl hiding out inside him just like the spy they already imagined him to be. They smelled her blood on him. It’s what made them kick him. Send him down hard and fast so they could use their fists. He was only spared when Mary Slingers walked with him. She lived down the street, went to his school. And though she must have known she was his only friend, it didn’t appear to trouble her. Mary met him every morning. Sometimes she talked to him during lunch, even in front of other girls.
There she was each morning, walking by his window, the socks of her school uniform pulled up to meet her skirt. From his basement window, Oskar watched as she arrived, as she stopped outside the butcher shop’s door. Her knees would grow red as she stood in the cold, tapping her foot impatiently so that her skirt rustled and revealed her thighs. Above that, Oskar glimpsed only darkness before the bell jingled and his father invited her in, leading Mary to the office above Oskar’s bedroom. Below, late (she was used to waiting for him), he’d listen to their muted voices while he packed his book-bag. Then up the stairs, he’d knock once, twice, on the trapdoor to his bedroom before he pushed it open and his father offered down a hand – pulled Oskar through the floor into the office like a hare out of its den. Then he and Mary were off together: the mornings rarely varied. Halfway to school, Mary rolled down her socks, pulled up her skirt. At sixteen, she informed him as she aligned her skirt just below her flanks, she’d already had enough of school. There was little else to learn.
It was something to stand beside her, something to be seen with her as they walked by the public school, past boys leaning against old brick walls, waiting impatiently from first bell to last for the school day to be over. Mary was crafty, artful, as she walked. She never paid much mind to the boys who leered at her, never spoke to anyone but Oskar until they walked through the Convent’s gates. Yet he knew she liked to catch their eyes, watch them struggle not to stare at her. When she bent to tie her laces, she’d stretch one leg forward, and flex her thigh, taking time to tuck her shirt beneath her waistband before she smoothed her skirt against her hips. Oskar always had the impression, though, that it wasn’t her power to tease that thrilled her. It was something else – the palpable taste of almost, but not quite, sex, a kind of constant she sensed all around her, like a salmon swimming against an infinite current in the quest for an unreachable mating ground. Already, Mary understood something she could only articulate many years later: that desire had limits, that to leave Hoosick Falls and move to a city – to kiss a boy, to love him even – would pale by comparison to the dreams she tended like a small garden whose flowers had not yet bloomed.
Perhaps it was this prescient schoolgirl awareness that kept her from being pestered. Because no one dared to approach her as she walked from Bevel Street to the Convent’s grounds, Oskar at her side. There were no catcalls, no propositions, never mind feels copped on crowded sidewalks. Oskar knew that as a chaperone, his efforts to protect her would have been futile. It was Mary’s presence that guarded them. Her confidence mocked and defied boyhood – her outrageous girlish sex compelling just as it simultaneously repulsed.
October 5, 1997
Letter Received at the Immaculate Heart Convent
Dearest Reverend Mother,
I hope this letter finds you healthy. That you remain sturdy, as full of iron, as I remember from my youth. That the ruler still leaps to your palm.
As a former student (Class of ‘82) and the new, if temporary, owner of Hoeckel’s Meats, I ask your help in the following matter.
It has come to my attention that Mary Slingers, another former student and my old childhood friend, may be living at the Convent. As I lost touch with her under peculiar circumstances many years ago, I ask nothing more than verification of her well--being. If in fact she has joined your number and wishes to see me, however, I would be delighted to enjoy her charming conversation once again.
You may be assured of my discretion.
My everlasting gratitude,
Oskar Heck
(formerly Oskar van Hoeckel)
1985–1997
Any Given Day
During her twelve years at the convent, Sister Joan always woke up early in the mornings to complete her daily chores. No longer the bold girl who grew up “on the Bevel” (as her old street was still referred to), Joan not only had lost the sleekness of her youth, but, more importantly, her impatience – the sense that she was missing out, that the world was a more eventful place than Hoosick Falls could ever be. Now the memory of her youth was like the scar she touched infrequently, but which raised just enough above the flesh, could still -remind her of its history with an unexpected brushstroke. Most days she ignored it – at last taking pleasure, even pride, in the woman she’d become. After years in the habit, her body mimicked its A--line flair. Her bosom shook, her muscles flounced. A welter had replaced the firm, quick step for which she was once known. Few people recognized her.
Rising at dawn, she dressed and went down to the porch to retrieve the butcher’s package. She didn’t bathe. All too soon she would be elbow deep in the delivery it was her job to grind. In the kitchen, dressed in her habit, a smock and slippers, she enjoyed working with her hands. They were deft, even graceful, as she sliced the pig shoulder into pieces, fed them to the convent’s grinder, and cranked the meat at a steady pace through its iron mandibles. She had to concentrate, focus her mind and arms together. If she stopped, the meat would jam the gears, require her full weight as leverage to make it chew again. Her powerful body – Joan delighted in its mass, the authority it gave her. When she sat, her backside enveloped her seat. When she walked from stove to sink, she felt each chafe of her thighs. Sister Joan had become aware of space – the space, specifically, her body took up. Her girth gave her presence, made her feel alive.
October 11, 1997
A Personal Day
Oskar had settled into work at the shop, into the blood and the marrow, the oily acrid scent that infused his clothes, his skin, his hair – a scent he was once accustomed to, but with which he no longer was familiar. After tallying up the first several weeks’ receipts, he knew the shop was doing well, that he was in keeping with his father’s will. So hardly an hour after he opened his doors, he decided to take the morning off, double his deliveries that afternoon.
In the park, a newspaper folded over one knee, Oskar relaxed on a bench. Pleased with himself, he sipped a cola slowly, watched the cars go by. Is the sun the same sun every day? he wondered, stretching out, looking down over the Hudson at the sun’s rays reflected among the currents cluttered by beer cans, branches, and small dead fish which had never grown to size. He flipped belly--up himself and studied the sky above him. In the glare, amoebas seemed to swim across his eyes. Oskar could see the bacteria inside him, that part of him even his body kept hidden. Or with which he’d grown so familiar he’d come to just ignore. They wagged their tiny bodies through his optic fluid, kept themselves busy until this one or that swam off the screen and another appeared. No doubt, he was falling asleep and – too soon – he had to return to work. One more month, he thought. One more. A life. In the city. Worth three months of blood and guts. Chatter over sweetbreads.
May 5, 1979
Sex
“Oskar.” Mary’s voice was sharp enough to wake him in the hours before dawn. She was leaning in his open window, forehead pressed against the glass. Her lips, forming words, seemed disembodied from her face. He could see her teeth, her tongue. He saw how she looked inside, the deep curves of her throat.
“Come out. Hurry.”
There was no need to persuade him. He did anything she asked.
Crawling up the stairs – quietly – he opened the trapdoor to the office, then slipped outside into the alley. When he joined her in the street, he found her on her knees looking down into his bedroom, as if she were studying something there that for the first time had caught her eye, and met with her approval. When she saw him, she quickly stood. Mary took his hand. Without explanation they were running.
There were alleys, short picket fences which they jumped together, steps and stones and puddles, before she led them toward the river’s pockmarked banks. He looked to Mary, but her gaze was set downstream where the black current fed the tributary that now was their horizon. When she finally turned, Mary almost seemed surprised that he still was at her side.
“Oskar.” She said his name as if it were an answer to a question she did not intend to ask.
Taking him by the hand, Mary coaxed him to a small grove upwind, beyond a clearing that overlooked the river as it dipped and gurgled past large round stones protruding from the surface. In the clearing, there was a blanket spread out on the grass, a water bottle propped against a tree. Oskar paused, but Mary gently pulled him on, as if she knew he could not resist her – that a boy won’t resist a girl who knocks for him in the night. He was shaking, though, and he knew she felt it as she led him by the large, round buttons secured with shop twine to his pajamas. At the blanket’s center, she pushed him down, let him go. Let him watch her muster up her courage. Mary took several breaths – once, twice. Then she began to strip as quickly as she would at home: as though she were preparing for a bath and had forgotten he was there.
“Oskar,” she said. He now knew what she meant.
Mary sat beside him, and beckoned him to take off his clothes. When he was ready, she pulled him to her, rocked him slowly against her breasts until he couldn’t help but climb awkwardly above her, lay himself unbalanced between her thighs like a stranded fish upon a rock. They lay still like that, his groin against her belly, their foreheads pressed together as the midnight breeze kicked up. The trees shook, Mary’s muscles clenched, and, breathing hard – he could not stop – Oskar pushed himself inside her. He was a living thing, he held onto her, and tried to find the way.
Below, Mary watched him. She watched him kiss her, watched his face first grow red, then turn pale, as he forgot her in a conscious lapse that was his body at last recalling what it had never known. How could she explain that he made her feel tidy, neat – that the sensation of him was merely pleasant – as though she had just cleaned the house, put her books back in her bookshelf, into their proper slots? Instead, she watched him closely. She even watched herself in the dry reflection of his eyes as Oskar clenched, and the rest of him followed in a gasp. Inside, she felt stung as the salt of him seeped into her. She winced as he stared down at her, uncertain what to do.
Mary pushed him off her, and as Oskar rolled onto his back, she studied him – wrinkled now – damp with sweat and the insides of her that he touched.
He was silent as he looked back at her, as dead leaves scuttled by them, fragile crabs across the grass.
Reaching for her purse, Mary began searching for the tissues she’d brought with her. She let Oskar watch as she squatted, poured the water down her crotch. Cleaning herself quickly, she mopped up the beads of water that welled around her knees. After, Oskar handed her the clothes beside him, and they dressed together quietly as if Mary had brought him to the river many times before. Yet when he was ready, she collected all of her belongings – the blanket and the bottle, the tissues too – and threw them off the bank into the Hudson.
Back in bed – perplexed, confused – Oskar could not sleep. He did not sleep for several weeks, it seemed, as Mary increasingly became strange with him, even stopped making her morning visits to the store. And then one day, she was simply gone. Mary disappeared from both the street and school. Oskar never heard from her again.
At sixteen, Hoosick Falls was too small. Mary must have had enough.
Once a month, Oskar went to see Mary’s parents, went to ask if they’d heard from her. Her father always put him off, hesitated, once slammed the door. So Oskar stopped inquiring. Two years later, he went West for college. And when, after graduation, he returned, it wasn’t to Hoosick Falls he moved, but to a studio in Brooklyn. In seven years, he’d written seven novels there, while working odd jobs to pay the rent. Meanwhile, the Slingers moved to Rochester. A letter Oskar once sent to their new home never garnered a response.
December 5, 1997
Headline, Hoosick Herald: “Hoeckel’s Meats, New Divine Owner,” by Michael Sterne
HOOSICK FALLS – Hoeckel’s Meats, a landmark storefront on Bevel Street, has once again changed ownership since the recent death of long--time proprietor, Joachim van Hoeckel. Van Hoeckel, an Austrian by birth, immigrated to the United States in 1973, and quickly became a popular character on Bevel Street, renowned for telling tales of elaborate proportions. Residents were not surprised, therefore, when he designated young novelist, Oskar Heck, as his successor under the auspices of a highly unusual document that required Mr. Heck manage Hoeckel’s Meats for a three--month term in order to inherit the estate. Since Mr. Heck’s tenure began in September, customer complaints have ranged from inconsistent hours to hygiene issues (there have been no official public health citations). Mr. Heck was also ticketed for public drunkenness and lewd behavior on October 14. Since van Hoeckel’s only proviso was an operating margin of +/- 6% of the shop’s 1997 taxable income, and Mr. Heck, according to van Hoeckel’s lawyers, fulfilled that obligation, the novelist inherited the estate (valued at $240,000) without penalty on December 1. Yesterday, however, Mr. Heck unexpectedly sold Hoeckel’s Meats (half of the estate’s value) for the sum of $100 to the Convent of the Immaculate Heart, to which van Hoeckel had donated considerable sums during his lifetime. Sister Joan, the Reverend Mother’s representative, refused to comment on the sale, though she suggested the town should pray for Mr. Heck. Mr. Heck himself issued a statement that he has returned to his former home in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he is now at work on his eighth novel – a bildungsroman, he says, a story of love and adolescence, tentatively -titled Hoosick Falls. He wished to assure local residents that the novel is a fiction. There will be no reference to town events or people living in H.F.
April 14, 1979
Outing
Once, Mary watched a pig get slaughtered. Mr. van Hoeckel had arranged a drive “out to the country,” and she agreed to go with Oskar (she always liked to leave Hoosick Falls). So on a Sunday morning, the butcher warmed up his old Dodge Dart, and they drove south for an hour to a farm in Kingston. It was only after they arrived that she and Oskar learned that Joachim had made the trip as a favor – to give the new owner (an insurance man until he bought the farm) a quick course in vivisection. By the time their Dodge pulled up the drive, a lethargic sow with ruddy spots was tied to a lamp post, the rope slack while she rooted placidly in a yellow patch of grass. When the sow raised her snout, she sounded mournful calls to a pen of pigs nearby.
After a hushed discussion (the men each smoked a cigarette as they leaned against a fence), the insurance man fetched a tarp and spread it out. Then, as Joachim pulled out his gear – a pair of hip waders and a slicker – the owner turned his attention to the pig. The sow seemed quiet as he led her by a rope, then tugged her onto the plastic sheet. Though the tarp buckled beneath their weight, the pig stayed calm, she didn’t protest. Didn’t squeal, even, when Oskar’s father swung one leg over her thick haunch, and squatted on her back. The sow only started crying out when Joachim pulled his knees together – braced himself – and pulled a shop knife from one deep pocket hidden in his coat.
Oskar turned to warn her. But Mary guessed what was in store. Already, her hands were cupped against her mouth, her jaw beneath them slack, as she watched the two men, large and incongruous, wrestling with the sow. Their long boots. Her pink flesh. Steel held in one armpit. Sensing its own imminence, the sow at last kicked out, babbled; the penned pigs began to stamp. But Joachim ignored the uproar. Smiling faintly, he directed the insurance man to smooth the tarp. Then he gave the pig a friendly pat so that, just for one moment, it went tranquil. Just long enough for Joachim to sigh and, as Mary breathed – once, twice – to slit the pig’s neck from side to side in one long stroke as if there never was another choice.
The pig faded, slow and down in its own blood, draining steadily – it would not stop – its death was programmatic. The rest of the slaughter moved on swiftly. Flipping the dead pig over, Joachim sliced the belly open, and the guts – a ruddy bouillabaise – slid out against his knees. With another cut, he tossed the viscera into separate buckets. Still another: the hooves, the head. Joachim was deliberate about the ways in which life was quartered: he carved each from each as though all bodies one day revealed to him this hidden expectation – each ball and joint, every cell. For Joachim, flesh could be dismantled not unlike the engine of a car.
When Oskar turned again Mary was all eyes, admiring the precise movements of his father’s wrists, the follow--through with arm and shoulder as he tugged and pulled fat from muscle using all his strength. She could not turn; she didn’t want to turn. Mary was in awe of her new knowledge: the body was reducible, it wasn’t whole unto itself. As the knife went about its efficient business, and the pig blood puddled on the tarp, Mary looked down, studied their reflections in its shallows. The men laboring with their tools and buckets. Oskar looking on, one step away. Then – as the sow’s blood swelled around her feet – Mary saw her own reflection too. The image of a girl.
Christina Milletti’s recent fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Best New American Voices, The Chicago Review, and is forthcoming in the Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction.