Ground Beef

When I come through the door, Amy is laying on the couch, the news lighting up the living room, weeping into one of Jason's shirts.

I do my best to ignore her, ignore the grief welling in my own throat, and head to the kitchen. I reach in my bag as I start to lay out all the ingredients that I brought. I glance up at the television, Jason's missing person picture and information flashes across the screen. Amy lets out a strangled cry.

Frustration bubbles up in my chest. If she would just put in an effort to find him, he was her son after all.

I push it down. She was my sister, and she was in pain. Right now, all I needed to do was cook her a pan of lasagna. I reach my hand in the bag for the last ingredient, and find the bag empty.

No ground beef.

Shit.

"Amy." I say tenderly. She peeks her head over the couch. "Do you have any ground beef?"

She stops crying, resorting to rapid sniffling long enough to nod and let out a strangled response.

"In the freezer."

"Alright." I say softly.

She retreats behind the back of the couch, her weeping returning, though it seems like its starting to slow. She might actually cry herself to sleep. I've seen a lot of things, but I have never seen a grown woman cry herself to sleep.

I retreat to the garage of her house, the white rectangular block of a freezer was tucked into the corner. I walk over to it, opening it and searching through the bags of frozen soup, homemade tomato sauce stored for a rainy day, just below a bag so full with food that its hard to pick up, lies an unlabeled bag of what appears to be ground beef.

There's seven other bags with equally strange cuts of meat, some ground, some strips. I stop digging halfway down the freezer, glancing at the bag of meat with a frown.

Screw it. She never labels her bags, if it isn't ground beef then it's some other form of meat that she trusted to someday ingest. She probably won't eat this anyway. I return everything but the bag of 'ground beef' to the freezer and shut the lid, dragging my feet as I reach the garage door, and enter back into the house.

Amy moved. She's sitting at the kitchen table, straight left of the kitchen, she still stares at the television, her eyes dull and red with crying. I do my best to ignore her as I put the bag of meat in the sink, running hot water over the frozen meat.

As I gather the rest of the ingredients, getting ready to start making the food, Amy falls asleep. Her head leaning on the table, wrapped in a blanket that she dragged from the couch. I sigh quietly, taking the bag from under the water and bringing it over to the pan that I'd warmed up. I put the still half-frozen meat in the warming pan.

Amy snored on the table as I watched frost leap off the odd meat, slowly, it defrosted enough to cook. Then it started to hiss from its place in the pan, browning. It smelt... different. The closest thing I could come up with was pork being grilled over charcoal.

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When I'd finished layering the pasta noodles, the sauce, and the strange meat. I slipped it into the oven, then I began to clean up.

I went to grab the plastic bag that had held the meat, I grabbed it, heading towards the trash, when a slip of paper fell out of the bag. I stop, bending down to pick it up. Amy's handwriting was a messy scrawl, it spelled out a date, and a few words.

4/12/13

Left arm

April the twelfth. That was the day before she reported Jason missing.

I put the empty bag on the counter, slipping the paper into my pocket. I glanced at Amy, she was still asleep, quietly, I slipped into the garage, curiosity, but more importantly dread.

I had miscounted, there were eight other bags. Not seven, slowly, I opened each one. They all had the same date. Each one labeled a different part of a body.

A human body.

One of them had a time recorded as well. Forty-two minutes before Amy called in Jason as missing, she put a human heart in a bag, a human heart small enough to belong to a missing boy. Small enough to belong to Jason.

I gape at the assortment before me, shakily, I stand up. Quickly. I re-bag all the organs, shoving the pieces of paper in my pocket, and stuff them back in the freezer, shutting it quickly. I move swiftly towards the door, my breath shaking.

When I open it, I turn to walk out of the house. Ready to run. Amy stands in front of me, blocking my way past her. She holds the empty bag that I'd set back down.

"Are you alright?" Amy asks. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

She cocks her head, not a bit of concern on her face. My heart is beating so quickly I think it will explode.

"Yes." I breathe. "I just wanted to grab something out of my car."

I make a move towards the door, Amy grabs my arm, stepping in front of me.

"Of course." She said detachedly. Then she glanced the direction of the garage. "What were you doing in there CeeCee?"

I cringe at the nickname. "Nothing." I say shortly.

Amy smiles at me. "Nothing?"

"Nope."

"Then why." She began, cocking an eyebrow. "Do you have one of my little labels in your pocket?"

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Police report

Reporting officer: Flint Jaseon, badge number 173

Amy Wren Chillron called the county police station at 1422, she reported that she was eating lasagna when she heard a thud in her garage, when she went to investigate, she found her sister, Celine Iris Chillron, brutally murdered, there was a hold carved into the garage door, allowing the murderer access from outside.. Amy has been eliminated as a suspect from the case, further investigation to follow.