The Slaughterhouse

I was too young when I bore witness to the full journey from life and death. How the legs still kicked a few seconds past the squeal. The voice is what goes first, a calculated rip of the neck or slash of the throat. A tried and true method passed down through generations. An oral tradition, seldom sung.

It was a rabbit. I can still remember what its crime was. A mother who, once we weighed her babies, recognized the scent on them as the very same that kept her caged, and spared them the same life she had endured. She killed them all that night, and that morning, she was deemed demonic. Her eyes stared into mine a second before my uncle took hold of her jaws (she was already dead then) snapped them and pulled the skin down.

In a blink, she was inside-out, and as I watched her lungs fall apart from her body I felt myself grow breathless.

I don’t know what happened to the babies, but every time I think of her wide, dead eyes, I think of the sacrifice she made for her daughters, and theirs. I grew up to be the one wielding the knife. I chipped my nails on teeth and learned how to listen to the end of a heartbeat, a final breath. I always held mine close to my chest, and finished the ritual light-headed.

The slaughterhouse became a place of learning. A humble beginning, sewn together with countless bloody ends. Now I sit in the woods surrounded by the strung-up souls of a hundred farmer men who made my hands red before I took the first of their lives. I didn’t mutilate them or pick them apart, but I let them keep their eyes open. The one mercy I gave, that they didn’t give, was to die looking at the stars.

I think of a mother who killed her young before they opened their eyes so they could die without seeing a world they would never inherit. I make an effort for the grass they never are, the water they never drank, and raise my daughters to do the same.