The Abattoir Incident: To the Sliced Open Spaces by Jamie Grefe

I am the muck that bubbles and a fever that shrieks from the bowels of pigs. I consecrate the flesh of sorrowful ones who peer into the fathoms of space in order to see their reflections in the blossoming stars. With wind and fire, teeth and blood, I meld myself onto my host like dead skin, burrow and bury myself in slits, in cuts, to the sliced open spaces. It is here in the abattoir and there in the muck that I wait and button tight my coat for the cold tonight is a howling frigidity. This fever: I shake in misery. This fever: I pass cup from lip to lip, a fever that dances itself into the brain where bugs burrow and flies swarm. You can feel them writhing and scratching at your throat. They drink the currents of your blood. They feast on veins. It is their birthright and they forge new paths through the body. You shriek. You find yourself in the field with the weeds on the periphery of the abattoir, an industrial complex with tubes, fence and smoke, shrieking at clouds that threaten to cover such glorious moons as these, shrieking at birds that answer you with diseased cackles. The door before you is a door that you have opened so many times that you can trace the path through the halls in your memory and see yourself lying on the table waiting for the doctor to begin to dissect. You smile with black teeth, tell them that the flies have begun to escape through your several orifices and the doctor she knows, she listens, nods and takes notes; she has heard of these cases and worked on these cases as few as four a day. Her assistants scrub you with soap that is slippery. Your naked body is slipping under the woos of the injection: the glistening needle that they plunged in the thick of your gums. The straps that bind you to the table are tight against your wrists and ankles. The bugs are swarming now behind your eyes trying to gobble up as much as they can. Your vision as it looks up at the cement ceiling can only see blurs, gobs, blips. The teeth of the bugs nibble out your eyes but the doctor reminds you that the swirl you feel is a swirl that you can subtly sink into. It is a consummation. Her voice, which up until now is delicate and precise, lowers in pitch, slows to a sludge that drips in your ears. The good doctor, she swirls away and floats down the stream. She is waving at you laughing with the scalpel in her hand. You hear them begin to saw and then all is nothing. It is then that you wake bleary eyed to the empty room. The straps are slashed. There is no one there but blood and smatterings of gore on the walls and blood on the table; your stomach has been sewn up and the cut is beautifully long winding like a path through the hills, from neck to nub. You find your bloody clothes in a heap on the floor and button your coat. It is cold out there. Somewhere in the distance a bow is scraping a string. You hear the squealing of the pigs deep in the abattoir and that, too, is a grating squeal. Fever bursts through your head and the sweat rises from the pits of your arms; you stand there wet and drip and you notice the utensils that were used by the doctor, the blood on the floors and walls is not your own you think, but you are not sure now and can only remember the swirling vortex of the stream and something about a scalpel. You no longer feel bugs. Your eyes feel like eyes when you take your finger and press on them. Your eyeballs are smooth to the touch. The cut from your stomach is leaking blood and thick yellow fluid. The leak stains your clothes a bright red. You didn’t know that your blood was that stunningly red. You take off your clothes, wipe down your body with a dirty towel, put the clothes back on again and walk outside with your coat buttoned tight. There is a domed light above the door. Flies are swarming around the light. The flies follow you and swirl about your sewn head, nip at your face but you let them do this and wonder if they are kissing you goodbye and that if these are the flies that were inside your body, behind your eyes, in your blood, then you think that they, too, deserve to be missed. You wish them well and tell them so. They converge in their swarm and disappear into the cold on a journey that you will never take. You find a cigarette in your pocket and the smoke in your lungs cuts nicely into your blood. You can feel the smoke seep into your brain as if your brain is being dipped in syrup but you think about the operation and are unsure what exactly happened, touch the back of your head, feel more thread and feel skin that has been joined together, touch your face and feel thread, realize that you have been sewn back into one piece and look to the ground and see so many bugs freezing into clumpy piles. You wish you could help but the fever is shaking your body such that you drop the cigarette. There is more hair on your hands. The blood is still leaking from your wounds. You lick the blood with your tongue as it runs from a wet spot somewhere on your face and down into your mouth. It tastes good, holy, like the cup that passes from lip to lip. You let the sound of the squealing pigs calm you and walk away from the abattoir door and out into the night.

Jamie Grefe licks his wounds, hugs his wife and pets his dogs from a high-rise in Beijing, China, where he teaches Literature by day and sips black coffee from a Craven A tin by night. He also, on occasion, creates experimental/improvised music with contact microphones and shortwave radio transmissions. His work appears or is forthcoming in Mud Luscious Press (Online), New Dead Families, Danse Macabre, Wonderfort and elsewhere.