Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world.

There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.

They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

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

It’s time for him to leave. He can’t handle El Gringo’s voice any longer. He can’t bear the way the man’s words accumulate in the air.

There’s something about her he’d like to break.

There’s a sharp, penetrating smell to the resting cage sector. He thinks it’s the smell of fear.

How many head do they have to kill each month so he can pay for his father’s nursing home? How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot, tucked him in, sang him a lullaby, and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing. Without the sadness, he has nothing left.

Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.

He says, “It happened to me too. I lost him too.”

A pit opens up and he’s free-falling, everywhere there are sharp edges.

He knows Cecilia will never get better. He knows she’s broken, that the pieces of her have no way of mending.

Cecilia’s words were like a river of lights, an aerial torrent, like fireflies glowing.

It’s not for health reasons. Since his son died he hasn’t gone back to eating meat.

Parents who name their children after themselves are stripping them of an identity, reminding them who they belong to.

Someone has written, “I miss the animals,” in small, restrained letters. Someone else crossed the words out and added, “I hope you die for being so dumb.”

“The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquility, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.”

The puppy runs its tongue along his face. He laughs and cries silently.

They’re beautiful, he thinks. He doesn’t want to hurt them.

He runs his hand over her belly. She’s eight months pregnant.

kill me now

“The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”

He had to teach her not to feel fear. Fear that was learned, ingrained, accepted.

But ever since Jasmine arrived, the house has been full of her wild smell and her bright and silent laughter.

“After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”

He cries a little and Jasmine looks at him. Though she doesn’t understand, she touches his face gently, and it’s almost like a caress.

They spend the rest of the afternoon beneath the tree and he thinks he can feel Koko and Pugliese dancing with them.

It’s then that he feels the stone shift in his chest and the tears begin to fall.

“Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun,” his father said, “but he flew, do you see what I mean, Son? He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.”

He couldn’t put it into words, not at the time, but he knew it in his body, in the way one feels that something is true.

“It’s based on the technique of death by a thousand cuts. That’s right, it’s from that book that just came out. The best seller. I have no idea, my husband’s the one who takes care of it.”

He takes Mari’s hands carefully and kisses them.

He wants to pity the Scavengers and be sorry about Luisito’s fate, but he doesn’t feel a thing.