Trigger Warning: Explicit descriptions of death, sexual content.

Even on the warmest days, the chill of the walk-in freezer lingered as a mist by his ankles.

Today is no different. The sun has barely risen, the dawn yawning a dark skyline into a bluing orange. In the near-dark, Vincent reaches into the display case and collects the tags of meat sold the previous day. He listens to the paper labels rustling in the crook of his palm, louder only than the rhythmic beating of his heart, and notes that he needs about nine fresh cuts of all steak, pork, and lamb.

The ice box, what his father used to call it, hummed to life behind him.

When Vincent was younger and softer, the nip would brush past his butcher father’s thicker legs and trace over the skin of Vincent’s calves like a cold tongue, the feeling giving rise to gooseskin.

Those afternoons, green with a youthful desire for his father’s attention and blue with cold, Vincent would retreat to the corner of the butchery where the summer air sat and curdled warm. He would fold himself into a tight ball, pushing his heels into his bum and drawing his knees to his nose, doing his best to look miserable and pronounce his tremors.

“Oh, the poor thing is probably hungry,” one stockier woman used to declare frequently, fixing Vincent with a foreign look and pushing a bitter chocolate into his palm, “Take this, dear.”

These dramatics would gain the attention of the older men purchasing shanks as well, though unlike the women who paid for his silly little pantomime in pinching fingers and candies, they would only provide a curt nod and a shiny silver nickel.

“Be a good man, take good care of your family, like your Pa.”

Never once did these theatrics earn pity from his father.

Vincent had once thought of asking, though after deployment in Vietnam, Vincent found that these thoughts were better dulled with the sharp edge of a large knife in the ice box.

While he works, Vincent likes to listen to the systematic on-and-off of the freezer motor somewhere in the mechanical room, buried deep within the recesses of the shop. He knows these sounds by heart, can count the seconds until shutoff on his fingers -- seconds and milliseconds -- and often surprises his customers by sweeping out of the cold closet and back to the register before they can ring the little golden bell on the counter.

“You scared me half to death, Vinny.” A man with missing front teeth once said. “You waitin’ for a girl to come in or somethin’?”

Vincent had chuckled quietly in response, sliding a sheet of cling wrap over a cut of breast. “One of these days, William.”

Vincent casts his gaze beyond the shop windows and retreats to the cold room. The cold room was set to thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit to preserve the primals, and it remained this temperature throughout the seasons. He used to find the monotony suffocating, the smell offreezer burn on flesh nauseating – but the coolness on his skin was welcomed now, sameness being safeness.

A picture of his mother always sat tucked away in the left rear pocket of his father’s pants, the corners doughy and pink from the constant wetting and drying of diluted, pink blood.

“She’s dead.” His father had huffed over a microwave dinner once, the steam from the floury potatoes glimmering on his cheeks. The vivid colors of a dinosaur cartoon on the TV bled the dining room table orange, washed over Vincent’s pale, pale skin. Vincent did not say he found his mother’s letters and clipped checks in a shoebox under his father’s bed. Instead, he sat at the table, unmoving, thinking of how his father slouched like yellow animal fat in a pile.

“Okay.” Vincent responds. He remembers how the blade glides down between sheep’s carcass, fat pared from the bone and left in a bucket, discarded.

He snaps on a pair of sterile gloves.

The morning is still young, as it always is when Vincent opens shop. As he unpacks slippery thawed pig and cow onto the butchering table, he sees the faint yellow glow of a six-o’-clock sunrise peeking in through the slats of the rubber strip curtains.

He closes his eyes and feels the warm wash of Vietnam push through him like a ghost. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, the heat was unbearable. USA military uniform drenched in sweat even with salt pills, he remembered a single beautiful young Vietnamese woman by the air base, eyes dark, hair dark, teeth white, a child in her arms but no husband, no money, no shelter. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

Sweat sheens at his temples.

Vincent swallows thickly, pushing a thick wad of saliva down a tight throat, dehydrated just remembering the terrain. His blue-gloved hands reach out to grasp at the reddish-white body of a sheep, pulling the carcass closer so he can brace over it and deconstruct the animal into shoulders, ribs, loins, breasts, and shanks. The stiff, dead flesh rubs wet and slimy on the pads of his gloves, congealing arterial remnants and bubbly lipid layers on the webs of his fingers through the rubber.

Vincent grasps the knife in one blue-red glove, peeling back the rib in a French Cut. The blade slides easily between flesh and bone, splitting the muscle and tendon sensuously.

He shudders. The bowstring arch of the ribs reminds Vincent of towering Flame and Jackfruit trees, curling languidly in the humid air, heavy with life and decaying, peeling bark. Laying against it, occasionally a dead soldier – more often a brutalized civilian, dragged from a nearby town by the limbs and mutilated beyond recognition, sitting still as a set of shoulders, ribs, hindlegs.

He reaches one arm down to raise the end of his blood-speckled apron into his mouth, taking the salty iron fabric between his teeth, canvas resting on his tongue, and flicks open the button on his pants.

He thinks of himself, a child, curled up in a ball in the corner of his father’s shop, irefully bathing in the residuals of summer while a chill constantly followed his heels.

How he had become bored of watching his father’s stoic face out of the corner of his eye, and instead counted the individual hairs on the arms clasped over his knees.

How he had bristled with a chill when the freezer curtains parted, even in his desolate corner, and watched in fascination and mounting horror as his skin puckered and pinpricked at the cold – hundreds of fuzzy ends standing attention at once – his skin resembling that which his father stripped from pig carcasses before hacking at them on the butchering block.

Vincent palms at himself, exhaling in plumes of hot mist into the frigid freezer air.

He thinks of his lover, Diu, how the sun fractured into crystals in her brown eyes, how her skin, tanned and exotic from the days on rice terraces and paddies, remained tender for his touch under the silvery moon of a heat-hazed summer – the same moon which had lit his patio back in America, when he sat out with the crickets, absorbing, allowing the world to both unfurl and clench around him.

His father never saw his mother again.

The checks under his bed went uncashed, untouched, though he recalls the creases on his mother’s letters, fuzzy fibers peeking out from wear. They had been folded and unfolded so frequently that holes wore into the divots of the paper, and Vincent had often worried they would fall right apart in his hands. She was not dead, but she may as well have been. Vincent’s father relished in her memory, as if she was a haunting, and never returned any of her letters. Eventually they stopped coming. The checks followed shortly afterwards.

Vincent bites harder at his apron, and reaches for a slab of soft lamb shoulder, thick with sinew and already lubricated with fat. His eyes flicker over to the patch of light travelling across the tile and up the side of the room, then to the protruding chalky bone of the unmoving pork hindleg.

He thinks of his lover, Diu, who he’d found tied to a post under the August sun, clothes stripped from skin, face stripped from bone. Her child was nowhere to be seen. He remembers stumbling over to her, the scent of iron dripping into his throat, fingers fumbling on the cord of rope binding her arms to her sides – burned with friction and stiff with death. He remembers the eyes of other soldiers on him from a distance while his ears rung with a thickening heartbeat, their lips moving, saying something, something, before Vincent’s upper gut grew sour and uneasy. He’d moved to pivot his head, though the bile had bitten its way up his tract too quickly.

He had first expunged an acrid mixture of beer and stew beside her half-putrefied body, the mixture catching partially in her stiff, upturned hands, extended like crescent moons, pooling and overflowing, absorbed softly by the black fertile earth. When his eyes strained open at the force of his heaving, his eye snagged on the flash of a silver ring he usually ignored while her legs were spread around his waist. But then her pale fingers, warmed by vomit, began unfurling. Clutched in her hand was a metal paring knife, untainted if not for rust, no smaller than the size of her palm. The vomit settled and amongst bits of teeth-gnawed, half-digested carrots and beef, he saw his own abominable reflection, temple moist with sweat, face pink with exertion, body trembling with the crime of having ever been hungry. When Vincent returned to the base, he vomited three more times. Those times, no one watched.

He fucks into the fistful of muscle and tendon in his hand, the jerk of his hips pinching a wrinkle between his brows. The slab is cold, they always are, he always is. His cock catches on the crux of a joint and his rhythm staccatos, he feels ill– feels the heat rising in the back of his throat – feels the tightening pressure in the core of his abdomen. He tries to think of anything but her flesh, everything about her flesh, thinking of T-bones, New Yorks, filets, paper pricing tags, golden bells, his hands, his vomit, his skin, the pelt of a pig and a tiny gleaming knife– he listens to the mechanical whirr of the freezer cooler cycle between a low and numb hum, a loose washer clanking loudly amidst the reverberations: tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, before finally falling off into a sudden, eerie silence.

Later in the afternoon, three-point-seven pounds of lamb shoulder is sold to a man in a fitted houndstooth suit and running shoes. When Vincent rings up the total, he punches in the anniversary date of her death into the register as the price-per-pound and slides the cling-wrapped corpse into a thin plastic bag. Day bleeds into night and the display will need to be filled again tomorrow morning, but tonight, Vincent is steady. Blue gloves still fit to his hands and the ice box at his back, Vincent stares out of his fluorescent-light-lit shop and into the world, at the deepening blue sky stained by a vivid orange hue.

The sight is beautiful, and it makes him sick.