A Recipe For Pork Belly
Pork was a best seller this week. Another delivery, another order, it was peak hour and the meat was selling faster than it had before. The trays were empty and the customers were brazen. She was the only butcher on call and was surrounded by dozens of pink, greased, hanging solids, tied from the anus to the roof, bodies attached to a pulley system that swung and directed the carcasses throughout the maze of the back. The shop was unlike any other, it was a house of biological rarity, a carven mausolea.
“Need a tray of pork belly!” a man’s voice shouted amongst the bustle.
She hurried to the first of the hung remains, two fingers curling into the hollowness of its mouth, dragging it from the freezer into the centre of her room, settling over a drain. Fingers retrenching into the folds of fat, glistening under the white light, a greasy reflective shine guiding her fingers over the flesh up to its thick neck. Wide, fatty, cold, pale against her skin. She traced her fingers along its snout, a sensation of hairs, ooze and mucus settling into her hand. She never wore gloves, she found a perverse delight in the slather of wetness and grease, the coldness of hardened pores, she would touch the skin of the carcass and then her own.
She gripped the body and turned it so the head was level with her, thrusting an s-hook into the back of its neck, the blunt tip penetrating the skin and emerging through the other side. She attached it onto the pulley system, body swinging with the bustle of the shop. Turning towards her bench, she picked up a large butcher’s knife, turning back to the body she held the thick blade behind her neck and swiftly swung it, settling into the trachea, spatters leaking from the severed flesh, sounds of the bone crushing, tenders separating, muscles splitting. She took a step back and marvelled at the fluids that landed on her apron. “More to you than I thought” she grumbled as she grabbed a paper towel and wiped the laminated material down.
She walked towards the pale pink creature emanating the room, her raw hands landing on its sides, gripping the solidified fat. She held the animal from behind and caressed its stomach. It was large and unusual, she felt it heavy with life. She picked up her blade and penetrated the swell of the stomach, she wrestled the tool out of the grips of contracting muscles and hacked at the protruding underside, a foul odour leaking and swallowing the room the further the flesh split. With one last stab, the tension of skin released and a plethora of organs escaped, intestines spilling, a warm and disgusting stench filling her nostrils. It was streams of red, pink, white, and then a sudden overflow of black, brown and green, an ominous sludge falling out and piling into a clump on the cold concrete floor. She bent down and let the weight of her hands penetrate the sinew of the sludge, searching through the mush until she felt solid. Wiping away the gelatinous folds revealed a blackened creature. She hurried to the sink and let the water from the tap wash away the grime, she held it like an injured animal, shaking and crying with grief, cupped in her palms in the deep sink basin. As she rid it of the dirt it revealed the true colour, the paleness, dotted with green blots of mucus, evil vines creeping down its spine and settling into the corners of its limbs. She turned the tap off and watched as the last droplets travelled down the body, from anus then hind legs, stomach, spine, front legs, and as the water reached the creature’s head, they split, halving themselves down one of the two necks that extended from the limp body. The droplets got caught in the corner of unformed eyes, empty and pale sockets, one, two, three, four, to be full of vision and sight but now submerged in the cold water. She looked not in horror but in sympathy to the creature, a waning image of godliness that seldom frightens even the most perverse. She held it by its hind legs, watching the liquid in the empty socks to retreat into the cold steel of the basin. She slammed the body against the walls of the sink, seeing the two faces merge temporarily with the metal before flinging the undeveloped foetus into a bright red bin sat in the back corner of the room. The bin was full, the creature landed on top, sat upon hundreds of other pale, sickened embryos and foetuses, there must have been a hundred of the bodies, but two hundred of the heads, empty eyes peering out as she went back to work.
She returned to the mother and looked at its open wound, flesh pulled outward, revealing the shadows and hanging organs, intestines half out, pooling on the floor, swinging in tandem with the body. She followed the slitted skin up to its neck, an unfinished cut, with its two heads hanging by tendons, exposing a half battered neck. She angled her head and looked into the bright and deathly blue eyes of the slaughtered pig. She looked at the first two on the left and then shifted her gaze to the second pair on the right. She brought the knife back over and did not aim for the already slit slide, but rather pulled her arm back and with such precision, threw it forward and felt it land in the webbed flesh holding the two pig heads together, one being severed completely, rolling off the thick shoulders and tumbling onto the ground.
It wasn’t the service or the paycheck she enjoyed, but it was the work, it fulfilled her, stripping the freak of its burden, hacking off one head too many, passing the blade through its skull, thorough dissection of tendons and careless butchery of muscle and meat, four quarters, diced, cut into strips, cooked into a double-headed pork pot pie or layered in a Cordon Bleu, pre-made and frozen. She enjoyed the scalping of fur or scales, splitting of flesh, reaching into the unknown, handful of viscera and intestine, gutting pink torsos, black torsos, ones covered in furs or scales, or ones that were white with spots of brown. It wasn’t cruelty, for these animals were burdened with a perversity that would not allow them to live a life in the wild. They would lay maimed, naked, in blood soaked dust, clotting and crumbling under the weight of hooves, paws, trotters, spread amongst the webs of feet. Here nature would be taking its begotten course, death without dignity, without use, all to have the furred or scaled flesh deteriorate and melt off the skull, making way for the worms and bugs and dirt dwellers of the Earth, the slaves of mother nature to enthral the fragrant accords of their polluted flesh. Instead, in the freezer, they have one last dance with mother nature, a waltz, a tango, it is all a performance, one step forward, to the side, maybe a swing dance with a spin, which head would Gaia look at? Which limb would she hold? A choice of more than four or less than two, which eye would she look into as the music dies down and the dancing slows? The creature will bow as Gaia backs away behind the velvet curtains, it will look into the audience, feeling the weight of their hungry gaze, at last there is reason and purpose in the death that awaited the freak since its birth.
Written by Lily Jasmine Dorranian.
‘Lily Jasmine Dorranian is an 18 year old aspiring author and lawyer, who’s an advocate for change. She runs a radical feminist online literary magazine, and studies law and arts, majoring in philosophy and English.’