The Other White Meat

You hate going to that town, and have ever since you were a child and had to go there for a Girl Scout meet-up.  Everything is sort of wrong there: the posture of the woman in the portrait on the wall changes and the little girls from that town have so many patches on their vests that it weighs them down and bruises their shoulders.  When they talk, it sounds like they are speaking in reverse but you still understand their words.  They generate a constant low buzzing.

The buzzing is similar in the freezer aisle.  

You had to stop in this town, because the storm outside nearly ran you off the road and this was the first shopping center to turn into.  You think that early May is late for a blizzard but months have started to mean less and wrathful nature comes and goes as it pleases.  

You walk past rows of frozen dinners with warm-sounding woman's names for the brand to give the impression of something home-cooked.  Bags of frozen peas limply lean over the shelving.  You can’t remember what you stopped off for, but the bags of peas tell you that you are not looking for them, green and frigid and unappealing.  You consider the selection of boil-in-bag soup.  You are not hungry.

The store itself is silent.  There are no squeaking carts, no mother admonishing greedy children for their demands of sugar cereal, no lovers arm-in-arm strolling past the processed canned ravioli.  There are no employees shelving boxes of dehydrated noodles or cleaning up the deadly pond of spilled vegetable oil in aisle 11.  There is no beeping of scanned products from the checkout counter.  There is no rumbling sound of coupons and receipts printing or smiling suggestions to “have a nice day.”  

You could have sworn you were not the only car in the parking lot.

You look out the front glass and see that the blizzard has buried your car completely.  You pull out your phone to call AAA but there is no signal in the store.  They put up signal blockers to keep the employees from playing phone games on their bathroom breaks.

The lights flicker and buzz, giving your head the migrain sensation of being crushed.  

You move closer to the meat aisle and all you smell is blood.  It is irony, pungent, nauseating.  Before you lay plastic-wrapped slaughtered cows.  A vegan activist has placed stickers on the cuts of beef which read “My name was Chloe and I wanted to live!”.  They’ve placed them over four or five cows worth of meat and you wonder how many cows named “Chloe” could have been slaughtered by the same store.  The cuts on the shelf before you are never the same when you look down and look back up again but they are all named “Chloe”.  

There is a sound like a cat mewling from the sliced bread aisle.  Despite your better judgement, you follow it.

On the floor lies a naked human infant.  It is bright red with a waxy substance sticking its little eyes closed.  Next to it, lined neatly, are a placenta and umbilical cord already severed.  You pick it up; it is sticky and foul-smelling and squirms, smearing the afterbirth onto your t-shirt.  You scan from the produce section to the milk and eggs but can find no mother.  In the health food section, you spot somebody turning a corner.

“Hey!” you run after them, bursting with joy to see another human being.  Even though you are still carrying the unclaimed baby, you feel a sense of relief.  One other person might be all you need to make sense of this.  One other person might make this all normal.  

The man is wearing a meat-smeared apron and immediately takes his arms out to receive the baby.

“Got pretty far, didn’t you little fella”.

He is handsome for a grocery store worker, his build more like that of a construction worker or lumberjack.  You rub the remains of afterbirth off of your arms and onto your jeans.  You are glad that the baby is no longer your problem. 

The strapping young worker uses the landline to call a tow truck for you.  You think about asking him out on a date, but asking at work feels like harassment.  But is this even work?  Is the store even really open?  You dont remember leaving your car and entering it.

The good-looking grocer takes the baby back behind the deli counter.

“Nobody gets away from me” he coos, then places it bottom-first in the grinder.  It screams when he begins to turn the crank, spitting out baby-slurry into a vat of filler that they use to pad out the store brand cold cuts.  The baby folds, shrieking, as it is ground bones and all into what will be sold as honey baked ham slices.  Baby meat is tender and not gamey like toddlers get.  

He enters a room in the back of the deli where six women are naed and shackled, five of them swollen pregnant.  They were all homeless women taken off the street, kept as breeding stock so that they would never run out of baby meat.

“It didn’t get away.” he announces, apron covered in fresh blood, and one of the women wails pathetically at the murder of her offspring.  She weeps seeing little chunks of flesh stuck to the apron, the seed of her womb now padding to the store brand cold cuts. They used to use little dogs, but it was too hard to separate from the sympathy they had from the animal.  Human babies are larval and useless and taste exactly like what you mix it into.

You hear the crying from beyond the deli counter, but you do not investigate.  There is nothing good that can be learned from today, you decide.  The tow truck comes for your car and you go home without thinking much more of the strange trip to the supermarket.  The snow has stopped, and instead of leaving a bleached purity over the world, everything is grey and miserable and slushy.  You have the strangest craving for a ham sandwich.