Tender is the Flesh

Owning slaves is prohibited. He remembers the allegations against a family that was later prosecuted for keeping ten female slaves in a clandestine workshop. They were branded. The family had bought them from a breeding centre and trained them. They’d all been taken to the Municipal Slaughterhouse. The females and the family became special meat. The press reported on the case for weeks. He remembers there was a sentence that everyone repeated, horrified: “Slavery is barbaric.”

He doesn’t clarify that she can order online.

“Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

For Spanel, touching, chopping, grinding, processing, deboning, cutting up what was once breathing, is an automatic task, but it’s one done with precision. Hers is a passion that’s contained, calculated.

In the city, everything is extreme. Raging.

Of course, he thinks, she doesn’t know she can.

There are no clouds or humans. It had been his cot and then it was his son’s. Products with sweet, innocent animals on them are no longer sold. They’ve been replaced by little boats, dainty flowers, fairies, gnomes. He knows he has to get rid of it, to destroy and burn it before his wife comes back. But he can’t.

he can tell because there are only three or four languages.

There are times when one has to bear the weight of the world.

Señor Urami runs his business with a reign of terror and that it works.