Food
by northern

The food factory is a good workplace. Justin is forty-three years old, and he doesn't have many other choices. Or any other choices, really, considering everything. So, a good workplace.

The animals hang on hooks, dangling from the cords that string their limbs together as the unending line of bodies feeds forward, one after one. They have already been shaved when they reach Justin's station, and all he has to do is to keep an eye on things so that nothing goes wrong, and press the button that moves the line forward by one. The line goes by quickly. Justin is good at his job.

There used to be a time when everything was different, when there were things for him like sun, drinks at the pool, and singing. Now he has the greenish light of the factory, a food pack twice a day and the noises from panicked animals on their way to the slaughter machine. Justin is good at his job, and as long as he is good at his job, he may be allowed to keep it, even though he's nearing the age when. The age.

He has worked at the factory for years now. It was harder in the beginning, when his stomach was a constant knot of roiling bile from looking at the animals. He couldn't stop seeing how much like him they were. Their pain and their... screams. It was hard closing his ears, when they sounded so much like how he might sound, in agony like theirs. In the beginning, he even heard words. "Help" and "please" and "fuck you". And "Justin".

His name was the worst one. He had a really hard time ignoring that. The animal wouldn't shut up from its place in the line. Even shaved and scalded, hanging from a hook, it wouldn't stop making noise at him.

"Justin stop this, Justin get me out of here, Justin you can't do this-"

All the way to the slaughter machine, it wouldn't shut up. Wouldn't stop wrenching its bald red head back to look at him with wide brown eyes, whites showing all around them. Justin had to listen to his name until the machine started to crunch the body up, legs first to crush the bones throroughly. Then he listened to the lack of words, following the process of the huge machine as it chopped and ground and minced, everything all together, spitting out little oblong shapes at the far end.

Eating his food pack the next morning, Justin chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed.

The staring eyes of the animals burn holes in his head, so he doesn't look them in the face. Sometimes they cry at him, as if he could save them.

Standing by the control panel, he listens to the little clicks and whirrs, the grinding of metal, until they become a song to fill his head. The animal noise and cries aren't part of the song. They can't be, because if they were, those would be the lyrics, and if those were the lyrics, the song wouldn't be very good, no good at all. Justin lets his eyes sweep over body after body, and presses his button in time with the music in his head.