MEAT MARKET

They made so many plans during quarantine, but as soon as people could gather again, Tyler decided it was easier to date a woman who didn’t work as a butcher. As an extra ‘fuck you,’ he texted Claire a month post-breakup announcing his decision to go vegan.

Claire tried to find refuge in work. Thanks to her ingenuity, she found new ways to package and distribute her meats throughout the community that involved minimal person-to-person contact, but she missed chats with her customers.

The chefs at the local eateries praised her meats to their customers, but when they called to order from her, the chefs turned into a character on some cooking show, foaming at the mouth and on the verge of a coronary if prime rib could not be had by the next day. It seemed lost on them that the only life and death battle involved by the time they reached her was the one the animal they were serving had already lost at the slaughterhouse.

Before the shop opened the next morning, she carved steaks off a carcass with her usual precision and reflected on how long it had been since she’d had an actual conversation with someone other than her sister. She had a couple of kids who came in to help her cover the register in the afternoon, but they were more interested in the people on their phones than her.

That night, she came home and called her sister and said, ‘I’m so lonely, I found myself serenading filets. This can’t be normal.’

Her sister advised her to try online dating. Claire instantly hated the idea. Dating in general freaked her out. Work always seemed to be a favourite topic for date number one, and most men seemed put off by the idea of sitting across from a woman who dismembered animals for a living and didn’t even live on a farm.

Still, Claire was so lonely she was ready to try anything and reluctantly downloaded a dating app. She even enlisted the help of one of her cashiers to take pictures for her profile that made her look more feminine. A casual shot at a cafe table with a glass of white wine. A head-to-toe shot of her pretending to read a self-help book at the indie bookstore across the street. No butcher’s apron or boots in sight.

She almost immediately got matches, but most of the guys seemed too vapid, and that’s when they sent words in the chat instead of dick pics taken in dive bar bathrooms.

‘What’s that supposed to even mean? I saw a urinal and thought of you?’ she asked her sister.

‘Just ignore those. Guys send them to everybody.’

Claire tried to give the app one more week, but by that Friday, she deleted her profile and headed to the bar on the corner.

Almost as soon as her butt hit the stool, the bartender brought her a shot and a beer.

Claire looked over her shoulder and said, ‘Is someone else sitting here?’

‘No, ma’am. It’s from the gentleman at the other end there.’

Claire leaned over and looked.

He waved from beneath a black, floppy hat. He had ice-blue eyes that reminded her of a husky.

After the whiskey and beer, Claire braved the establishment’s sticky floor and visited her blue-eyed benefactor.

‘Hey,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I’m Rod. Nice to meet you.’

‘Claire,’ she said and gave his hand a firm squeeze.

‘Would you like to sit with me?’

Claire nodded and hopped onto the stool. Rod ordered another round for both of them. Next thing Claire remembered was him carrying her back to her loft above her shop.

She woke up to her alarm naked and saw blood between her legs. She wrapped herself in a sheet and walked toward the sound of running water in the bathroom.

‘Oh, hey!’ Rod said with her toothbrush in his mouth. He pulled it out and spat in the sink. ‘I hope you don’t mind. You can sterilise it by putting it in the dishwasher.’

Claire shook her head and walked in the other direction toward her kitchen. She methodically went through all the steps to make coffee. Sticking to a clear set of easy steps usually kept her tears back.

She pulled a bread knife from the block to slice a bagel in half when she felt Rod’s hands behind her–touching her shoulders. She blinked, and she was back on the bed the night before, with him forcing himself inside her.

Claire spun around and stabbed him until he fell to the ground and then kept stabbing him and crying.

When the coffee machine beeped, she looked around the floor at all the blood and started trembling.

‘Oh no. No! Shit!’

Her mom raised her with the belief that shower thoughts solved everything. She took a shower and still felt overwhelmed after, but she at least felt collected enough to grab a bag and gather everything Rod had touched and drop it into it. After she dropped that bag in the dumpster at the bottom of her stairs, she scanned the neighbourhood. She was fairly secluded in the back. She remembered the black tarps she bought for moving big chunks of meat. She unlocked the storeroom, pulled some out, and carried them back up to the loft with her.

It took some creative sliding and a lot of handwashing, but Claire managed to roll Rod’s remains into a black tarp version of a dolma. She sealed any spots that might leak on the way down with duct tape. Then, she killed the remaining daylight hours scrubbing her floor. Around midnight, she took the wrapped Rod down the back stairs and dragged him to the back of the walk-in refrigerator.

She decided to call her employees and let them know she’d be closed Monday. She needed more time to figure out what to do.

True crime documentaries taught her that it was much harder to identify a body if it just had the torso, but what would she do with the other parts? Also, what would she even do with a hundred and fifty pound man’s torso? That’s not the type of thing Claire normally planned for.

Claire surveyed the equipment in her shop and thought about what she did every day: transforming muscle and organs into unrecognisable cuts of meat. She couldn’t just carve Rod into steaks. That would be too obvious, but hamburger? Sausage? That was easy.

Hair, skin, bones, fingernails, teeth–harder to process, but the rest would be de rigeur for her.

Claire donned her black apron, rubber boots, and her long gloves. She pulled a large mallet off the wall and straddled the taped-up tarp. She reached down and pulled open the part covering Rod’s face. He stared up at her with his now milky-blue eyes. She could swear he had a stupid smirk on his face.

How could he do what he did to her and use her toothbrush and smirk at her?

Claire yelled, ‘Fuck you, Rod! Fuck you and your fresh breath!’

She swung the mallet and smashed it into his skull until his head was nothing but a mealy puddle of bone bits, teeth, and eyeballs. Claire had a strong stomach, but eyeballs always grossed her out. Even cow eyeballs. Why couldn’t they just gracefully smush with everything else?

Claire dropped them into a metal bucket along with the clump of hair she fished out of the goop.

She sighed at how much work lay ahead of her, but the rest of him had to go. She lowered her meat hook from the ceiling as close to the floor as it would go. Then, she shoved it between his shoulders with a satisfying crunch. She flipped the switch and watched what remained of his body go up. After that, she focused on disarticulating all the major limbs at the joints, peeling off the skin, and finally deboning what remained of Rod.

The sun was setting when she glanced through the front window briefly. She decided a hamburger was the best option. Sausages would take too long, and Rod had already wasted way too much of her time.

Claire stowed her containers of ground Rod in the refrigerator and labelled the containers, ‘Hamburger Grind. Use First.’ She sorted what she could between compostable waste and biohazards. Nobody wanted to look at that stuff, anyway. Also, she was exhausted. She hosed the space down and mopped with diluted bleach. Then, she locked up and headed back to her apartment to shower again and wash her clothes.

As she lay in bed that night, her stomach growled, but nothing sounded appetising.

Claire started a little late the next day. She told the cashiers that she still didn’t feel 100% after the previous day’s illness, but she was still able to prep the majority of the cuts and grinds as usual.

She spent as much time as she could in the back office with things she usually avoided until the last minute: invoices, emails, voicemails, questions about partnerships, supplier inquiries–all the things various business coaches told her would improve her overall cash-flow if she only managed them more strategically. They also pushed her to add TikTok videos and to start wearing lip-gloss.

The hours between opening and waste pickup passed like a week. Claire kept reapplying deodorant even though she was right next to the meat locker. She still had a voice of doubt in her mind: What if someone notices that something is off?

She heard a knock on her door and saw a guy in a waste management uniform with a clipboard and threw up in her mouth.

‘Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I just need your initials acknowledging that we're resuming our pre-pandemic schedule. Is this a bad time?’

Claire held up one finger to signal, ‘One moment,’ and spat into the wastebasket beside her desk.

She swished some water in her mouth as she signed.

‘Sorry. Bad takeout,’ she said.

‘Thank you. Feel better soon,’ he said.

Later that evening, Claire lay in bed with a tray of tea and avocado toast. As she flipped through emails on her laptop, she found a message with the subject ‘hamburger.’

Blood roared in her ears. ‘I’ve been caught. This is it.’

She took a breath and opened the message. It was from a guy who wrote a local food blog called ‘Burger Heaven.’ He’d picked up some of her hamburger meat and found it to be such a revelation that he needed to talk to her about it and find out what her secret was for making it so special.

Claire froze momentarily with her fingers above the keyboard. He seemed sincere, but was there more to this? Either way, delaying didn’t seem wise. She wanted to know what he knew, if anything. She agreed to meet him at the corner bar. She knew those logistics well.

As it turned out, he was a lovely man named Francis who loved food and had a particular affection for hamburger, sausage, and bologna. He also loved a good pâté.

‘I offer those sometimes too,’ she said.

‘I’m in love!’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ she cautioned.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘If you must.’

‘You’re so open and honest. I feel like I can tell you anything. It comes through in your meats too. There’s something different about them. Just full flavour. No pretension.’

Claire nodded, smiled, and sipped her wine.

Even though she didn’t want someone like Francis around, he was insistent. He also said he loved the sound of her voice and insisted on getting under her desk back at the shop and eating her out during her vegetarian lunch the next day. She still wasn’t able to face meat.

After a week of that, she felt like she had to tell him something. So she invited him to dinner at her loft. She served a Tofurky with all the trimmings: fine cocktails, quinoa balls, beet gravy, and gluten-free chocolate cake. It was all delicious, but Francis was left wanting.

‘Where does that amazing flavour come from?’

‘The key is having trusted sources,’ Claire said.

‘Obviously, but who are the trusted sources? Nothing tastes like your meats.’

Claire sipped her drink and looked him in the eye through the candlelight, ‘You want the real answer?’

He seemed to contemplate this. ‘Yes, I do. Probably more than you know.’

That took her aback.

‘What if I told you it was human meat?’

Francis coughed.

‘Forget I said anything,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘It’s a proprietary blend.’

‘Does this “proprietary blend” include human meat?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

‘Why? How?’

Claire explained what happened with Rod, her loneliness, how much Francis’s admiration meant to her, and then it dawned on her that she loved Francis, and she had to kill him because he knew too much.

Francis sipped his wine and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

‘I’m sorry. I feel I’ve failed everyone,’ Claire said.

Francis walked to her and knelt by her side, ‘No. I’m so honoured that I’ve met you and had this experience.’

He kissed her lightly at first, so she could feel his warm lips touch hers. Then, he deepened it. He held her after and whispered, ‘Show me. Show me where it happened.’

Claire led Francis to the shop and unlocked the back door. She debated about how she would slaughter him. She wanted it to be as painless as possible. As she ran through the possibilities, she motioned to the disposal bins, the hose, the bleach, the hook, the switch, the saws, and then she felt a sharp burning pain in the back of her head.

Francis stood over Claire’s now lifeless body and found himself wondering what the best way to carve her up and savour her would be. He decided he would use her organs to make a pâté and make the rest of her into delicious sausages and a hamburger grind. She deserved extra time and attention. So many women had helped him discover his kinks, his talents, and some of his interests, but he needed Claire to show him he was a cannibal.