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Abattoir Jordan Sanderson
 

The T-bones, strips, and filets keep the lights on.  Otherwise, the butcher isn’t interested in them.  She knows they will end up the polar opposites of the white plates on which they will be served.  A couple, no doubt, will hang in throats, throttling the evenings of surrounding tables, making a brief hero of a maître d’.  The butcher often thinks back

to the first hind-quarter she carved into concentric hearts.  She skewered them and placed them in the display case, but no one bought them, so she ate them raw.  She liked that they came back up before her digestive system filtered them.  Only the taste remained with her.  Everyday, she handpicks the best looking carcass and caresses it with a scalpel

until ribbons fall from it.  She ties them in bows in her hair, tosses the longest around her neck like a boa, buckles small intestines around her waist, and practices her walk.  She shapes briskets into effigies of movie stars, her favorite Beatle, and the first human offering to the gods.  Then, she molds the gods from the amalgam normally reserved

for franks.  She lines her creations up on the stainless steel table and lights votives, which warm the figures, making them feel recently alive.  She consumes them in reverse order of their appearances, allows them to tease her stomach before tickling the back of her throat with a taper.  She thinks of herself as the altar on which calves perpetually burn.