MEAT IS MORTAR
by Wendy Velasquez
The city dropped off six bodies for Cassie to process. Two men in gray coveralls wheeled the haul to the shed at the top of the factory and stacked them next to a smoke-colored table saw. At the edge of the table saw, a steel ramp allowed Cassie to shove dismembered arms, legs, and torsos into a chute leading to a processor the size of a small house. Beef and pork sidled in from separate conveyor belts. The machine ground the bones and flesh into a salmon, gooey concoction that eventually became Gorski’s Original Sausage. Delicious, if one asked Cassie’s opinion, but nowhere near as scrumptious as some of the soups her boyfriend Trenton made following their evening intimacies. Some of having morphed into a gnat in her conscience. The man detested change. His share of the bills came from a meager check he earned organizing membership drives for the North American David Carradine Appreciation Society. And he cooked dinner. Insisted on the same thing, night after night.
Boring. And Cassie knew it.
She chose the feet of a young woman found on subway tracks. The exact day her killer dropped her on the 7 line, according to the city men, could not be determined by the coroner. No family ducked into the local precinct inquiring about her. No husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend claimed her. Nobody cared. Like all the stiffs blended into Gorski’s sausages—abandoned. Without anchor. Cassie severed the woman’s feet at the ankles. The blade eased through tendons and muscles like a knife through warm butter. The spirited whine parting stiffening marrow, as always, a kind of music. The meat, thankfully, hadn’t rotted beyond the point of safe consumption. The dead woman’s smudged toenails, a sure sign she’d been homeless for some time, wouldn’t bother Trenton. She wrapped them in thick plastic and stuffed them inside a black garbage bag.
*
Trenton praised her choice. “It’s always nice when they’re a little fresher.” Following a ritualistic tapping of the movie poster for P.O.W. The Escape, hanging intentionally crooked on the wall, he swept aside the top sheet dangling from overhead. He tuned a transistor radio on the windowsill to the classical station. Rich violins swooped from the speaker. Cassie asked whether he knew the composer. “Vivaldi,” he said. “Baroque. Refined and wild, all at once.” He kissed her forehead. His dry lips briefly stuck to her skin. “Like you.”
“Sure.” She stripped off her navy coverall. A mandatory uniform at Gorski’s. She complained once, pointing out nobody beyond management and the bureaucrats at the morgue knew she existed. Her boss, a hairy troll named Mike Dixon, spit platitudes about decorum:
“What would we say,” he said, bristles jutting from his Hobbit nostrils as he spoke, “should some pushy inspector walk in on you in the middle of a delivery?” He waited for her to respond. Satisfied she wouldn’t, he said, “We’d have to explain an employee on the premises not dressed properly. That would be embarrassing.”
Trenton complained about the appreciation society passing him up yet again for vice-president. “Has anybody snagged as many new members as me these last five years?”
“No?” Cassie slunk onto the narrow twin-sized bed occupying the left side of the room. Held the dead woman’s severed feet in her hands as Trenton slipped out of his unwashed jeans and positioned himself under a beam supporting the studio’s angled walls. He gripped the top sheet secured to it. Tightened the loose end around his throat. He lifted his lower legs, swung like a piñata, and stroked his rising cock.
Cassie rubbed the dead woman’s feet between her thighs. Moisture seeped from her lips as Trenton tugged himself harder, faster. He wheezed, his throat, Cassie assumed, unsure how to negotiate the lack of air versus the need to elicit groans of pleasure. She maneuvered the dead woman’s feet over her vagina. Used the lifeless toes to flick her slicked clitoris. Trenton’s eyes bulged as he approached climax and, possibly, death. His seed splattered across Cassie’s belly. An ivory pool gathered in her naval cavity. She pretended to come. Made a show of her stomach muscles tensing as her eyes rolled back. She let out a descending coo as Trenton placed his feet on the ground and ceased strangling himself. He massaged his throat and announced, “Sweet.”
She said she agreed. She wished they made love the way normal people did. Finding a man who shared her culinary interests, however, had proven difficult. She’d had to process the ones who called her crazy, threatened to snitch. Cutting their throats, not so troublesome. Sneaking them into the plant at night? Not as easy. She left the dead woman’s feet on the bed for Trenton. In the bathroom, she ran hot water over a gray washcloth. She wiped Trenton’s semen off her skin. Scrubbed away dirt, disease, or anything else unpleasant colonizing the dead woman’s feet.
From the kitchen, Trenton said, “You know it hurts my feelings when you rush like that to remove my jizz from your casing.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She slid on her panties and stepped over the bed and into the kitchen. She sat at their Ikea breakfast table. A chipped, wobbly piece of furniture rescued from the sidewalk. Trenton had sliced three Roma tomatoes and an onion. He carved rigid meat off the dead woman’s bones, dropped the chunks into a pot of boiling water. Soup, as usual. He insisted no finer, healthier way to digest human flesh existed. He claimed the base absorbed any nutrients the heat scaled off the meat. Whether true or not, she had no idea. She loved his soup, but yearned, similar to her need for variety in the bedroom, for him to broaden his repertoire as a chef. The man could get a legitimate job if he learned just a few more methods of preparing animal flesh.
He dumped the tomatoes and onions into the pot. Sprinkled salt, pepper, and curry into the mix. Stirred it with a wooden spoon, sampled it every few minutes until he smacked his lips. “There it is.” He divvied portions for each of them in plastic Gorski’s Original Sausage bowls Cassie received on her six-year anniversary at the company.
They sipped the soup without speaking for some time. Trenton conducted an invisible orchestra with his fingers, waving them in rhythm to the music on the radio. He’d left the window open. Chatter from people outside on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and drinking drifted into the apartment. Provided the comforting sound of conversation until Cassie asked, “Could we maybe, some time, try a stir fry instead?” She braced her legs around the wooden school chair on which she sat.
He propped his plastic spoon in his bowl. “I thought we’d discussed this.” He launched into his lecture about ritual, how their lifestyle demanded no changes, no surprises. “If something doesn’t go down the way it normally does,” he reminded her, “trouble follows.”
She did as she always did, apologized and assured him she wouldn’t challenge him again.
*
Working by herself, high above the factory floor, Cassie’s thoughts, over the next few weeks, wandered into the territory of self-assessment. Did Trenton’s routine really satisfy her? Physical orgasms occurred in the shower, in the morning, by herself. Yes, the man cooked a mean flesh and vegetable soup, but did his happiness outweigh hers? He never offered appreciative words about the risk she took, bringing him severed feet night after night. She had her own keys to the factory. Arrived before anyone else and left after everyone else. But risk existed, dammit. And this man who provided himself, in his own words, cosmic orgasms, did not seem to recognize all that she sacrificed to make him happy.
She arrived at this conclusion:
She deserved more.
She deserved a man who enjoyed human flesh as much as she did and made her come. Dammit. Modern American women knew their value. Why didn’t she insist he respect hers?
Finally, she quietly packed her clothes in a laundry bag and ducked out one morning before Trenton awoke. What a relief to leave the factory that night without a dead person’s feet slung over her shoulders. She stayed at her sister Connie’s apartment for two nights. Stomached servings of Gorski’s sausages before feeling the crave. The need to eat pure human flesh and to pleasure herself while watching Trenton simultaneously masturbate and choke himself. In the absence of these activities, she understood just how interesting life with Trenton had been; And so, she amended her radical judgment and opted to return. Wrapped up a fresh set of severed feet from an older woman who’d leapt off the Roosevelt bridge and landed, not in the water, but on the concrete pathway running alongside it. The fall, no doubt, pre-tenderizing the meat in a fashion impossible to replicate in a kitchen.
She unlocked the door to the studio apartment without making too much noise. She dropped the trash bag containing the severed feet as soon as she entered the room. Trenton had, apparently, decided to relieve himself without her accompaniment. His skin had developed a pleasant iris hue. His purple tongue poked from his mouth. He hadn’t, it seemed, climaxed before his breath expired. A common mishap among men indulging in the hobby. The smell of rotting flesh permeated the apartment. She shut the door. Hoped the neighbors wouldn’t pick up on the stench until she could figure out what to do.
“I’m sorry.” She bowed her head, less out of her declaration of sorrow and more as a result of the shame she felt constantly needing to apologize to this reckless, if fascinating, man. He knew the dangers. Had he more sense, he’d have negotiated with her regarding the stir fry. She untied the bed sheet from around his neck. His body tilted and collapsed sideways. Rigor mortis and his peculiar positioning at the time of his death left him pretzel shaped. A glance out the apartment’s open window revealed nobody on the darkened street below. She struggled to lift him to the windowsill and shove him into the night. His lanky, twisted body tumbled into a row of bushes. She slung the bag with severed feet in it over her shoulder and left the studio.
A slow parade of people strolling on both sides of the street forced her to sit in her car and wait. Once the coast cleared, she backed her mid-sized sedan to the bushes. She opened the trunk as she marched to the branches in which her ex-boyfriend rested. She huffed and grunted, tugging the dead man’s corpse off the thorny brush and sliding it into the trunk. As far as she could tell, nobody noticed.
She drove to the factory jealous of the city men who transported bodies in white vans with municipal plates and without worry of capture by the law. If a police officer pulled her over, she decided, she’d feign mourning, cry her eyes out, and claim she didn’t know she needed to call the authorities before delivering her deceased lover to the county morgue. But she pulled into the Gorski’s lot without incident. Found a gray, plastic utility cart and hauled the body into an elevator and up to her workstation. She disassembled Trenton on the table saw and allowed the orphaned arms and legs and torso to rest in the chute until morning, when she’d drop the remains into the grinder and allow lucky consumers across the nation a sample of the final meal he’d provide.
After securing his long, filthy feet in a black trash bag, Cassie left the factory and drove back to the studio. She undressed and lay on the bed. Used Trenton’s gnarled toes to pleasure herself. Not having to interrupt her journey on account of his finishing early, she achieved the first orgasm she’d experienced outside of the shower since first hooking up with him. She imagined Trenton’s ghost joining her, hanging at the end of the bed, waiting for her to come before he did.
She rummaged through the cabinets in the kitchen and found the wok she’d brought with her to the relationship. The wok Trenton refused to employ in their post intimacy dinners. She sliced cubes of his flesh off his feet and stirred them in with tomatoes and cucumbers sizzling in vegetable oil and garlic sauce. The aroma ascending from the wok replaced the flat, lingering smell of death. By the time she sat down and chewed the first sweet, fried bit of Trenton’s flesh, schemes and plans for her wide-open future saturated her thoughts. Would she shack up with another man down the road? A man who shared her enthusiasm for cannibalism? Who knew. All a part of the roulette wheel spun the moment freedom presented itself without complications.
Wendy Velasquez writes stories about human errors. Her stories have appeared in Killer Tales, Pulp Modern, and The Magnolia Review. She is currently at work on her first novel.
