By Max Steiner.
Head out to the slaughterhouse down near the docks and get yourself a job on their swing shift sticking cattle. Sign up for six days a week. When they ask you what’s the heaviest you can lift you shoot high and yes you’re good with power saws so that won’t be a problem ma’am. Turnover’s a bitch and you know they’re always hiring. The way it works is the livestock comes in single file up a chute and through a vinyl strip curtain onto the kill floor, and there you are with two other guys already waiting in your steel-toe boots and extra plastic bags slipped over your throwaway Goodwill clothes like it’s a makeshift hazmat suit, and you go ahead and use this special gun that’s got a retractable bolt and place it sort of where two imagined lines between the cattle’s ear and opposite eye cross and shape an X-target there where the skull is weakest, and more often than not the retractable bolt does a real good job of it and leaves only a keyhole of a trace, i.e. it scrambles their brains to a real good mess and knocks the living daylights along with any sense of pain right out of them, out of the cattle, who most of them at this point just quiver and buckle and drop down kicking their legs if the bolt didn’t also sever their spine up high at the neck and end their reflexes too, so that it’s a bit of a dance for you and the guys to get in up close and avoid any blow that would send your kneecaps flying as you shackle and hoist the by now mostly dead thing with a chain around its ankles, but there’s no way around it really and so up they go, the cattle, hung ass over head onto the what’s called the bleeding line, and before they’re even hoisted up all the way you’ve already taken a knife to the jugular at a neat forty-five degrees and sent them along to bleed themselves dry, and you sometimes can see one of the stronger steers or when you messed up the brain-scramble thing with the gun you can see the by now mostly dead thing upside down on its last seconds still arching its back like it’s trying to right itself. When the potato-sized daughter you love like stupid nudges you over breakfast and asks Daddy what do you do for work like what’s your job? you’re caught off guard and pour her another bowl of Cheerios to buy yourself a good five seconds and then you go ahead and call it exsanguinate, the bleeding part, you and the guys exsanguinate the cattle you say, and your daughter sits there spooning soggy cereal and pretends she understands. At a clip of one every minute it’s easy math: you stick and bleed 480-some cattle per shift plus minus. Every couple days your super rotates you around to other stations to avoid carpal tunnel and injuries you get from looping the same sixty-second stun-stick-hoist maneuver pretty much non-stop. The rotations make it so that Mondays you’re on the kill floor with your twelve-inch knife and the retractable bolt. Wednesdays you thumb the button on a high-pressure gas tank and blow brains out into buckets. By Friday you’re on to scraping fat off kidneys and boiling it down to quality tallow that goes into lipstick and shampoo. You settle into the routine. Some things stop really bothering you all that much anymore. Slowly you can feel the months hang off you. Other questions over cereal are Daddy what’s that smell on you and why’s there all those Goodwill clothes and when’s Mommy back from out-of-state, and all you manage is a tired Kiddo you’re so young it breaks my heart. Meanwhile OSHA’s just about abandoned this place, and when your buddy gets his arm snagged in the meat tenderizer Admin & Medical try to nail him pissing hot for uppers and deny him pain meds until he’s filled up a cup, and at the ER the in-house insurance guy makes him sign away his right to sue. It’s one of those type incidents where it’s like Jesus—stuff happens quick. They hand out Tylenol for broken thumbs and let you walk it off. Cleaning staff’s got eyes this red and lungs all shot from huffing broad spectrum Clorox. Some guys you can see the MRSA start crawling up their forearms in patches all swollen and scarlet and pissed. None of your higher-ups will come right out and say it but the rule is if you complain it’s your ass is gone. Because you raise a stink over how they treat your buddy, they have you tie off cow rectums with extra-thick rubber bands or zip-ties or something for like a couple weeks straight. Double shifts are back-to-back and take what’s left right out of you. It gets so you miss the kill floor where you witness more than just blood comes out of the by now mostly dead thing. You can tell it’s still got its lights on upstairs after you brain it if it rolls its eyes up large & wet to look at you not straight ahead. And when she scoots up close and shows you a cut she got messing around with a crushed soda can and wants you to steeple your eyebrows and coo like you used to, you look down at her palm and run your thumb and want to say oh Kiddo but you draw a blank, are right there miles away, wondering if a size smaller cartridge than the 9×17 they have you use wouldn’t keep the stun gun from wearing out as fast, and your daughter she gets this look on her like she’s lost at Kmart, aisle nine, and tugs your shirtsleeve pained & soft, asks Daddy you still there?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Steiner lives in Berlin, where he teaches kids English. Find more of his work in Rejection Letters, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, and SAND. Email him at maxfsteiner@gmail.com with anything you find interesting, especially the small innocuous stuff.
