Posted by Sawney Beane on August 01, 2007 at 22:13:53:
The Collected Works of Sawney Beane: Volume #125
EPIPHANY
by Sawney Beane
3 July 2005
1,600 words
DISTRIBUTION NOTICE and DISCLAIMER: Sawney Beane requests that any distribution of this work of fiction remain within the realm of social responsibility. This story is suitable neither for minors nor for the seeming majority of adults who have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. It is pure fantasy, which means that, for whatever reason, someone has found it interesting to think about the events depicted herein. It does not in any way mean that the author would like to see this fantasy become reality, so if you are the type of person who might be swayed into doing something irrational by reading a work of fiction, the author respectfully requests that you decline to read further.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sawney Beane, originally a native of Edinburgh, lived for twenty-five years in a cave on the coast of County Galloway, subsisting on the flesh of unfortunate travellers, roughly a thousand of them all told. He and his wife raised a large family of eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters. Eventually, the family was captured, and the whole lot was brutally and unjustifiably tortured and executed without trial. Since his death in the early 17th century, Beane has reformed his ways and now confines his atrocities to his literary endeavours.
WARNING: This story contains scenes of semi-consensual snuff and gynophagia. If you find such things offensive, please steer clear; you have been warned.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: A rare use of the second person narrative style. One of my attempts to get into the head of the doomed.
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It's not unusual that you finally realise that you are nothing more than meat only when you enter the slaughter room. Some concepts are difficult to grasp.
Up until then, your restaurant experience probably looked a lot like living for a week in an all female dormitory where the women wear slightly less clothing that is customary elsewhere. Sexy and distracting, yes; but it doesn't really tell you what you are in for.
Even when you are called to work the dining room floor, the experience is just a little surreal. You wouldn't be there in the first place if you weren't at least a little bit of an exhibitionist, so walking around nude between the tables of well-dressed men and women is not enough to really shake your world up that much. It is exhilarating, no doubt, and the crude jokes and groping hands of the men goes back and forth between amusing and deeply irritating, but through it all, you maintain your sense of self.
Even when you notice by chance that the succulent rump roast the fat man at the next table is tucking into is decorated with an elaborate butterfly tattoo not unlike that adorning the derriere of your roommate Kathy, you don't make the connection. You don't let yourself think that Kathy is indeed no longer amongst the living. You know but you do not realise that all of the girls in your section are to be slaughtered today. You know but you do not realise that your arse will in all likelihood be featured on someone's plate before the close of business.
Not until you get to the slaughter room.
After you have done your duty in the dining room, an attendant leads you and two of your peers, blonde Lucy and brunette Sheila, into the back. They wash you all down, scrub you clean, which is not really necessary since you have been thoroughly cleansed earlier in the day. Still, it is good to get the rude diners' paw marks off you.
And then you are led down the long hallway to the slaughter room.
You know where you are going and why. You did volunteer for this at some point, although you can't at this moment remember what it was that appealed to you about the idea. You feel suddenly cold; the small bumps rising up on your bare arms and legs. You can hear one of your companions' teeth chattering, but you're not sure if it is Lucy or Shelly. And, come to think of it, you are starting to forget which of them is which. Lucy was the brunette, right?
The attendant flings open the door to the slaughter room at the end of the corridor dramatically, and your eyes are suddenly flooded with the horrors beyond. No one seems to notice that you have arrived except for a man with a clipboard who begins to speak cordially with the attendant who has led you to this hell.
"What are we doing with these three?" the attendant asks.
"We're parting, 'em out like all the rest," says the man glancing at his clipboard and comparing the numbers on his sheet with the one tattooed on your hip. "Very heavy today, business is booming, but we're short rumps, shoulders, and bellies. Gotta get these through as fast as we can."
The rest of the conversation is lost to your consciousness because your eyes and attention are transfixed by the arse of the woman directly in front of you.
It's a nice arse, but you're not usually so enamoured of women's arses. It's just that this woman is kneeling on a raised platform ten feet in front of you with her neck cradled gently on a wooden block. The whole thing would not be quite so horrifying were it not for the burly man raising a wickedly-efficient looking axe next to her.
You can't see the woman's face, so it is difficult to tell if she is someone you know. But nonetheless, you are starting to get a much more direct sensation of what you are doing here. One of the women standing next to you lets out a slow mournful sighing sob. It's the blonde you think. She must have had a name, but you can't at the moment think of it.
The man with the clipboard is still in conversation with the attendant. The axe flies blindingly rapidly through the air. And, with a sickening thud, the body of the woman on the block parts company with her head. In the elegant choreography of the operation, a passing worker catches the flying ginger-haired head in midair as it leaps away from the blood-spurting body.
And now you see another horrifying sight that makes your stomach churn. The worker has placed the head, which you can now recognize as that of one of the girls from your floor, Kelly something you think she was called, in a pile on a counter in the corner of the room to your right. Just under Kelly's chin is the grimacing face of a girl you also knew once as Amy. Of the dozen or so heads whose faces you can see from your vantage point, you realise that you recognize at least half of them.
You feel a warm stream of liquid running down your leg.
The man with the clipboard turns away from the attendant for just a second to take a hose from the wall. He sprays warm water down your crotch and legs with a hearty chuckle, "No worries, lassie; happens all the time. Anyway, better to have that stuff outside you than inside you I says!"
Soon the evidence of your lack of bladder control has been washed down the drain near your feet, and you begin to notice the even more disturbing developments on the other side of the room.
Off to your left, the body of the ginger girl has been dragged to the wall and hung upside down by the ankles. A steady stream of dark red blood is still flowing from the severed neck into a collecting trough. But the half dozen other bodies hanging on this wall are in even more dire shape.
A man is making a long slice down the belly of the body in the middle of the row. You wonder to whom this body once belonged. You wonder if you chatted with her at breakfast. Now the man is shovelling entrails from her gaping belly into a bucket.
The other corpses further along have been thoroughly gutted and hosed down. They look like what they are-meat hanging on hooks. You watch a man lift the furthest one along and carry it over to a butcher block you have not noticed before because it is on the side of the room opposite the door and partially hidden behind the man with the axe.
Which girl did this body belong to? Did you talk to her? Did you laugh with her? Did you like her or dislike her? What was she like? Does any of it matter now?
The two men with vicious knives begin to hack the body rapidly but precisely into what it has been all along. Once they have with brutal efficiency hacked apart the rump, shoulder, ham, leg, ribs, belly, brisket, tenderloin, and dozens of other premium cuts of meat apart, it is easier to see what it was. But it was always that. The meat was just all stuck together. And you may have chatted with it over breakfast, but it was always meat. It just didn't know it. Just like you didn't know that you were meat. Not until just now.
And then the man with the clipboard points in your direction and tells the headsman with unsentimental directness, "Do that one next."
That's when your mind begins to spin. That's when you forget that there were two other women brought in with you. That's when it all becomes clear. That's when you know for sure what it is to be meat.
You climb with automatic obedience to your destiny. You place your knees where all of the meat's knees have gone. You place your arms around the block as all meat's arms have been placed. You place your neck on the block as all meat has done. You know the man with the axe will soon sever your neck and send part of you to one side of the room and part to another. And all of you will be processed into meat. And no one in this room, least of all yourself, will think that there is anything wrong or sad about the whole episode.
There are tears in your eyes, but you don't know what it is you are mourning. You know now that you are nothing more than meat. You forget what it was to be more than meat. You wonder if there is anything better to be than meat. You think perhaps you should be more afraid at this moment, but you feel an odd serenity. You feel that if you are meat, you might as well be good meat, and you have the self-confidence to know that you will be.
The last thought that goes through your head before cruel steel violates the tender flesh of your neck is a vain attempt to remember, purely as an academic exercise, the name you were called by before you became meat. It is not coming to you easily. And then, before you can properly work out this puzzle, suddenly you are nothing...