Meat Head

The Night Shift: 10.30-5.30 am. The cows streamed in through the narrow way like a slow, fatty trickle. Second shift – break over.

         Daniel was operating the boltgun – Billy the Bolt, the fellers called it – and had just cleaned it after tearing a hole in the skull of the last lump of flesh.

         The room was big and white, with rows of brilliant lights – the whiteness of it got to be like a blow to the head, but you could always zone out of it. The factory floor was pale linoleum – it seemed to give the blood a terrible dimension. One every five minutes: decapitated, gutted, skinned, and washed. They usually thrashed about for a short while as they spent their last – a cruel person might laugh.

He often wondered whether they ever knew they were dying. He often wondered that. They were disgusting. Something about it was disgusting.

         It was sometime in the early hours. He’d killed perhaps thirty cows that day: the farm held, at any one point, up to 50,000. Farm: more of an industrial prison. Cow-schwitz, he’d often joked. It was a Nebraskan establishment: Norton Meats. But there was no Mr Norton – he’d died in the ‘50s. This place had been expanding for near 90 years, buying out small farms and denuding the land. Cows and dirt and grain – just cows and dirt.

         There were several men on tonight besides Daniel. There, there, he thought; easy, now. He’d just cleaned the boltgun again. The thud was soft, but he imagined a lengthy stretch of time filled with crunching and squashing and squelching and ruptured blood vessels. He’d worked there for six months. Over that time, he’d noticed the animals’ eyes more and more – those eyelashes. Was there more there than just shit and fur?

         He wiped his brow. The whole place was big and brilliantly ventilated, but he felt he might’ve been coming down with something. The blood was nothing – besides, it was soon washed away. They could get through five-hundred cows in a week – that’s 225,000 pounds of meat. That’s a lot of waistlines to fill.

         A cow approached him, the eyes big and inconstant – more like a fish’s eyes in this moment – and moaned low. Did it know its fate? Boltgun, processing, distribution, down the gullet, out the arsehole, and into the ground. Could it infer from the immaculate, organised carnage, from the faint musk of iron in the air, that its number had been called?

         Daniel looked intently at it, then put on his mask, held the boltgun to the cow’s head, and pressed the button. It shot out several inches into the animal’s skull. It went down in a heap of legs, blood, and traumatised flesh, convulsing in this church of white, cold death.

         It turned his stomach. The animal would soon be dead. Its head would be removed, a sharpened blade, wielded by some poor Mexican’s arm, would loose the contents of its stomach, and then its skin would be stripped off, washed, and shipped off to Norton Leather.

Michael approached. He was 6’2”, blonde, with a small scar under his right eye, and a cleft palette.

‘Michael,’ Daniel called out. ‘Come here.’

         ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Michael could see he looked uneasy – this feeling had been growing in Michael for some time.

         ‘Oh, nothing. Well… no, no: it’s stupid.’ He scratched his head, then his cold, coarse cheek. ‘I’ve an odd feeling, Mick,’ he said. ‘I’ll be honest: I don’t think I can do this job anymore.’

         ‘What do you mean?’ asked Michael. He looked shocked – the suddenness of it, the lack of grit, the unreason. ‘What about Martha? She ain’t holdin’ down a job, is she? You know times is uncertain.’ Michael paused. Daniel was still working over the gristle in his mind. ‘What about the security, the –’

‘I can’t explain it! I just feel… odd. I - I keep thinking… I keep thinking whether the animals can, you know, perceive the world – you know, anticipate their deaths.’

Michael looked at him blankly. Perceive the world? he thought. Anticipate death? His first thought was that Daniel had been up too long or slept too little. Had he become cranky?

          ‘What do you mean?’

         ‘Well, what if they can anticipate their deaths? What if they’re conscious? What then, huh?’ He thinks about their eyes going from placidity to panic. Pasture to packaging.

         Michael thought about this: ‘Well, I’m not sure. I guess that means it’s murder. I guess that means –’

         And then the foreman came onto the killing floor. ‘What’re you doing? I overheard ya. Why ain’t you workin’?’

         ‘It’s – it’s nothing,’ said Daniel. The next cow approached. The boltgun felt leaden in his hand. Michael looked at Daniel oddly, almost scared, and Daniel felt naked and dead: the blood congealed inside his veins.