The Meat Processor
by George M. Scott

Henry wiped the sweat off his forehead with a towel and looked up at the clock.

"Damn," he muttered to himself, "it's only ten. Only two fucking hours, and I feel like it's been all day. I hate this fucking job!" He could have shouted his displeasure and no one would have heard because the noise of the saws and conveyor belts was so loud. Henry often complained to his fellow workers, "You can't hear yourself fucking think in this goddamn place."

He hung the towel on the hook and picked up the cleaver. "Damn ribs." With one expert chop, he split the sternum, separating the rib cage into two parts. He listened and heard the scream of his unit's band saw and knew he would have to wait his turn to cut them up.

Another thing Henry hated about his job was all the protective clothing he had to wear. He knew it was necessary to protect the meat from contamination and to protect the workers from any diseases the meat might carry, yet he still resented it. For even though the temperature was kept low, he always felt hot. Not just hot, but hemmed in, closed off. Damn mask and hair cover and boots and gloves and long coat. And to make matters worse, except for the gloves and boots, they were all paper. The stupid owners thought they were saving money by using disposable garments instead of washing and reusing ones made of cloth. Henry often wondered how the idiots ever managed to create the New World Meat Packing Company. They sure as hell didn't know how to run it.

He slammed the cleaver into the table and told himself not to sweat the stuff he couldn't do anything about. The owners lived in their world and he lived in his, and those two worlds never met. And if a super ever heard him complain like this, he'd be out of a job real quick. And out of a marriage even quicker. While he could live without Glenda, he sure would miss her cooking. And the sex. Boy, would he miss that.

"Hey, Henry, you'd better speed it up," Frank called over from the next workstation.

"You're sure draggin' your ass on that last one. Gotta finish before lunch, you know."

"Yeah, yeah. You do your work, and I'll do mine."

"One more red mark and you're gonna lose pay."

"Don't tell me what I already know."

"Hey, you two," Supervisor Williams growled, "stop your jawin'!" As usual, they hadn't heard him approach. "I catch you talkin' one more time, I'll report you."

After the super had turned his back and was walking away, Henry muttered, "Bastard," and heard Frank chortle.

Finally the scream of the band saw stopped, and Henry hurried over with his ribs before anyone else could get there. He began sawing. When he finished he tossed four sets of short and four of long into the wheeled rib bin.

He returned to his table and started on the rest of the carcass. First, he chopped off the forelimbs and sliced meat off the bones. He tossed them into the bin marked "Ground." Then he worked on the hind limbs, preparing them into larger cuts—steaks and roasts—and placed them in the appropriate bins.

Next he pulled out the intestines and took them over to the sink to clean them for tripe. He dropped them into their bin and went back to his work station. He turned the carcass over and sliced meat off the back and cut it up into cubes and threw them into the bin marked "Stew."

"Now, you're cookin'," Frank whispered as he passed by on his way to the band saw.

Henry tried to hide his smile but wasn't sure if he succeeded.

The final job was the brain. He used a small circular saw to cut around the top of the skull, then removed the squishy thing. Funny, he reflected, such large brains for such stupid animals. He carefully placed this delicacy into a special container and placed it in its bin. Then he tossed the rest of the carcass into the "Meat By-Products" bin. He thought with a chuckle, why not use the real name--"Pet Food."

It was almost time for lunch so Henry scrubbed and hosed off his work table. He felt pleased that he'd finally gotten into a rhythm. The only way to make time pass, not to mention finishing his quota of five carcasses in the morning shift. That's right, lose yourself in your work, shitty as it is, and the day will pass much faster. When he returned from the break, the full bins would have been sent to Packing and be replaced with empty ones in Processing, and it would all start over again.

Finally, the lunch whistle blew. Henry joined the line of workers trudging down the row of carcasses hanging on the hooks of the conveyor line.

"Hey Frank," he whispered behind his shoulder. "These things sure are ugly."

"You oughta see 'em with their skins on and runnin' around. Ugh."

As he looked at the long bloody things, he thought of the workers, called wranglers, who managed the herds and who did the killing and skinning.

"I heard the wranglers sometimes take out a nice fat one and roast the whole carcass on a spit over an open fire."

"Yeah, I heard the same. No butcherin', just cook the thing whole."

Henry lowered his voice even further. "You know, I don't much like meat."

"Amen to that, brother. Me neither."

"Has something to do with the job."

Frank snickered. "Gee, you think?"

"But I might like a nice fat one roasted whole, out in the country under a star-lit sky." He breathed in deeply, as if he could smell the meat cooking in the cool night air.

"Probably make the meat more tender and give it more flavor, too."

Now Henry could taste it. Juicy with fat and blood. Green saliva dripped from his three rows of teeth. His twelve eyes glistened and his antennae quivered. Then reality reasserted itself and the saliva dried up, the eyes became dull, and the antennae drooped.

"Aw, hell, the really fat ones are all gone by now, and the only meat we'll ever eat is this dry and tough shit." He pointed his claw at the dangling corpses. "Damn skinny humans."

George's first novel, A Fearful Symmetry, is in the hands of an agent, and he's putting the finishing touches on his second one, Rituals of Murder. His short fiction has appeared in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Nefarious: Tales of Mystery, Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Without a Clue. He's recently had stories accepted for Bullet Points Anthologyand the Rhine Research Center Mystery Anthology. Visit his website at www.georgemscott.com/