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 barely thins in the soap. When I tie my shoes, it dyes the laces. 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.

For seven years, I've been working here. Seven years of moving product, of tracking shipments, of pretending not to see what makes our profit margins so impressive.

Everything we sell is soaked. Every vacuum-sealed product sweats 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 that eat through the concrete. We step over them, around them. When I lift a crate, the plastic sticks with a wet sucking sound. When I scan items, the screen smears and shorts out from the moisture. The gloves only trap it, make my hands sweat until the mixture curdles inside the latex like spoiled milk. I toss them out and keep going. No one asks questions. It's easier to smile at your coworker with blood crusted between 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 used to think I was just good at my job. My numbers were solid. Management nodded when I walked by. I understood the calculations, the cost-benefit of each extraction. How much blood you can drain before the source gives out entirely. How to process maximum units while the bodies still twitch.

They gave me small raises for innovations that wrung more from already emptied vessels. My suggestions were tried on a few production lines. There's a certificate somewhere in my locker, blood-damaged and illegible now.

My parents think I'm doing fine. Steady work, they say. Better than nothing. They don't visit my apartment or ask about the smell that follows me home. They just nod when I send money for their prescriptions, for the heating bill.

The turning point came a few months ago.

I was watching them wheel out three carts of premium product destined for high-end retailers. Each box pristine on the outside, saturated within. The driver had kids' drawings taped to his dashboard. Stick figures holding hands under a yellow sun. Something about those clean crayon strokes made my stomach turn over.

I thought of the way it touches our children, stains their toys, floods their futures. I thought of the production floors where the windows don't open, where the ventilation stopped working years ago. Where small people work until their small fingers split and their lungs fill with metal shavings and their eyes cloud over from chemical exposure.

That night, I stood before my bathroom mirror and saw something carved hollow. I press fingers to my throat and feel nothing pumping. Perhaps I've given all mine too.

Now I steal. First, canned beans. Then medical masks. Then pallets of soap. Then a shipping manifest was "lost". A truck took a wrong turn. Medical supplies that should have gone to a private hospital chain ended up at a free clinic instead.

The woman who signed for them didn't ask questions. She just stacked box after box while her hands shook. "We've been reusing masks for months" she said. Her fingers were stained too, but differently, with the other.

For the first time in years, something in my chest unclenched.

The encampment under the bridge became my first regular mistake. Then the shelter that never had enough beds. The kitchen that fed anyone who showed up. I learned their needs, their desperation. I learned how little it took to keep someone alive one more day.

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 blood rushes back into the places it was drained from, I will be standing there, unclean.

"There's blood on our hands" they'll say. As though the stains stop at the wrist. As though you could touch it, handle it, wade through it, and not have it seep into every part of you, sinking deep to the bone. As though there's any part of us that isn't red right through.