Spoilage

There's blood on my hands.

It congeals in the creases of my knuckles, slick and cold some days, tacky and half-dried on others. I can smell the iron and rot as I track it around with me. When I wash my dishes, it thins in the soap. When I tie my shoes, it dyes the laces. Nothing is untouched. I've tried bleach, steel wool, boiling water. I've watched my skin peel and pucker, but the stain stays. It's not just on me, it's in me. Worked into the meat.

Everything we sell is soaked. Every vacuum-sealed product is sweating something red. Shrink-wrapped electronics glisten like they've just been birthed. The cardboard boxes pulse with it, seepage at the corners, collecting in dark puddles. We step over them, around them. When I lift a crate, the plastic sticks. When I scan items, the screen smears. The gloves only trap it, make my hands sweat until the mixture curdles inside the latex. I toss them out and keep going. No one asks questions. It's easier to smile at your coworker with blood in their teeth than ask what they've been eating.

Fluorescent lights catch the sheen, a fine glaze just under the surface, like lacquer. It pools in the uneven sections of concrete floor, in the grout between tiles. You walk careful or you fall. Some do. I've seen new hires slip and split their chins. The blood that comes out of us is a different one. Brighter. Healthier. Our blood gets mopped and bandaged. Theirs is packaged. It keeps the machine well-oiled.

I'm part of that mechanism. I've known this for years. My hands slide products across scanners while something vital drains from other bodies. I collect paychecks cut from the same flesh I help carve. Because there are quotas. Numbers tracked in red. How many units moved, how many pounds shipped, how many lives fractioned. Spreadsheets that don't account for exhaustion or desperation. Bar graphs that climb higher each quarter while something human diminishes. I've approved invoices for things I've never seen. Signed off on shipments with destination codes instead of addresses. Turned blind corners and pretended not to hear the wet sounds from behind locked doors.

Sometimes I stand in aisle seven, home goods, and watch customers lift objects still tacky with someone else's effort. They pick up decorative pillows sewn by hands that crack and bleed. They examine cookware fashioned in facilities where the air is thick with metal dust that coats lungs and slowly suffocates. They try on clothes stitched in rooms where windows are barred to prevent jumpers. They don't seem to notice what sticks to their fingers. They don't taste what I taste when I lick my lips at the end of each shift. The copper-penny tang. The salt of someone else.

The worst part is that I excel at this. My numbers are good. My performance reviews are glowing. Management nods when I walk by. I understand the calculations, the cost-benefit of each extraction. How much blood you can take before systems fail. How to process maximum units with minimum waste. I've studied the efficiency of suffering. They've promoted me twice for innovations that wrung more from already depleted resources. My ideas have been implemented company-wide. There’s a plaque in my locker commemorating my exceptional contribution to company growth. It sits in a small puddle of its own.

My parents are proud. They tell their friends about my success, my steady climb up the corporate ladder. They don't know what the rungs are made of, what gives beneath my weight. They see only the apartment I can afford now, the car, the clothes. Clean things purchased with dirty money. Sometimes I want to show them my hands, hold them up at Sunday dinner and make them look at what their child has become. But would they see anything? Would they care?

At night the mirror shows someone hollowed out, eyes like empty wells. I press fingers to my throat and feel nothing pumping. Perhaps I've given all mine too.

A few months ago I watched them wheel out three carts of product. Premium items, destined for high-end retailers. Each box pristine on the outside, saturated within. I helped load the truck. I signed the manifest. I smiled at the driver. He had a child's drawing taped to his dashboard, stick figures holding hands. I thought of the way it touches our children, stains their toys, floods their futures. And something inside me finally ruptured. Now I steal.

First, canned beans. Then medical masks. Then pallets of soap. I override shipping logs, reroute inventory, leak what the machine hoards. I hand out supplies behind dumpsters, under bridges, in hollowed-out buildings.

They're starting to notice. Security's been tighter. Cameras blink longer when I pass. Managers wonder why I'm always just a little too eager to know how things move. They'll catch me. Maybe soon. But by then, it won't matter. There are others now. I see them wiping their hands on the same red rags. People who've tasted what it means to feed others. People who've found joy in subversion, in rusted pipes and stolen goods. We recognise each other by the way we hold our hands slightly apart from our bodies. We move through this blood together now. We know what it means. We know what it costs.

I don't want forgiveness. I've gone too far, taken too much, been complicit too long for that. Redemption isn't possible when you've helped build something this monstrous. When you've profited from pain. When you've trained yourself to ignore the obvious suffering that makes your comfort possible.

I want collapse. Complete and irrevocable. I want to hear the machinery splutter and wheeze and stop, gears seizing as the blood congeals. I want to watch supply chains snap, distribution networks fail. And when it comes, when the pipelines burst and the concrete cracks and the water rushes back into the places it was drained from, I want to be standing there, drenched, unclean, laughing with my hands wide open.

Let them see the red. Let them see what we've swallowed.