essential worker

On his way to work, Charles often liked to stop for a muffin. The muffin shop was warm. The woman behind the counter always had a knowing smile strapped across her face. She was younger than Charles but gave him maternal feelings. Charles hadn’t come to appreciate muffins until he was already an adult, but something about the shop brought him back to childhood; so whenever he had time, he would make sure to stop in on his way to the slaughterhouse.

Charles was a slicer at the slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls. He had a locker where he would everyday store his “civies”, as they like to call them, and what remained of his muffin, before adorning his white sanitary uniform, complete with goggles and facemask. As a slicer, it was Charles’ job to run his electric, mounted, razors-edge knife across the chest of pig after pig, who were then conveyed to the “gut snatchers”, and eventually on to be deboned.

It was ugly, violent work, but Charles far preferred it to his previous job as a cashier. As a cashier, Charles was always wrong. Customers never liked the way that he would bag their groceries, change was often miscalculated; when the customers left he would pull out a little black notebook and write down everything he had done wrong. But as a slicer, Charles knew his role exactly. He worked tightly with his co-workers, able to communicate through procedure, even when their native languages were not the same, taking turns, spinning and dismembering their wards. And besides, Charles far preferred being a slicer to deboning, or worse, entrail duty.

The building was extremely large, cold, and metallic. It needed to be, to keep the carcasses cool and to function at a high level. Such slaughterhouses had once shared the landscape of wholesale death with smaller operations and local butchers, but now less than eight hundred processed the meat for the entire country, and it took just fewer than fifty to delegate death to ninety eight percent of the nations livestock.

The magnitude of the operation was not lost on Charles. With the constant sounds of the live animals, and the humming and grinds of machinery used for more force intensive jobs, and the stench of the pigs internal lives suddenly becoming a matter of public discourse, there was no avoiding the grandiosity of the gruesomeness there, even in his early days at the plant, as normality first crept in to his daily routine. The rivers of blood became that of his own, the squeals and smacks, his clinking change.

One day as he buzzedly worked, he heard a different type of sound; human. To his right, one of his fellow slicers it seems, had managed to take off a rather large piece of her left thumb. One of the others at her station hit the emergency button, and work came to a pause. Charles felt remarkably calm throughout, he thought. He later remembered the image of her blood running in to the blood of the slaughtered, effortlessly and identically. At the time however, Charles could only think of the rooms harsh lighting. Under the bright fluorescent overheads, the emergency had not seemed quite so urgent to him. In fact it was business as usual, another piece of meat, another stream of blood. Several people began to cry.

That night it kept him awake. Should he have been more affected? Was work taking a toll on his humanity? He liked his job. It was a good job, and he was good at it. Charles didn’t want to, but since he wasn’t falling asleep anyway, he could no longer ignore his need to pee. Now that he was up, Charles was feeling thirsty. He opened his fridge and reached for a pitcher of water, when he froze. He was staring at a half eaten rotisserie chicken. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it, his hand suspended there between his chest and the water, reaching towards a desire he had all but forgotten. Charles retracted his arm and closed the refrigerator. He was no longer thirsty, and he went back to bed.

Six weeks later, the woman returned to work. Her hand was still in a wrap but her spirits seemed high and everyone welcomed her back with hugs and smiles and well wishes. Charles gave her a wave but he could not bring himself to meet her smile. They had never actually spoken before; she seemed like an extremely nice woman but something was unsettling him. He could not get the image out of his mind; she, gripping her hand in the other, deep red blood flowing steadily towards the floor.

“Charles!”

His head whipped.

“You’re holding up the line.”

Charles was in fact, he discovered, holding up the line, but suddenly he found himself unable to focus. He was dizzy.

“I need a break”, he said.

“Your break isn’t for another half hour. Can you push through?”

“No”.

Back in the locker room, Charles returned to his “civies”, walked over to a sink, took off his mask, washed his hands, splashed some room temperature water on his face, and looked into the mirror. But when he did, he did not see Charles.

He saw a collection of muscles and bones, sinews and flesh. He imagined it easily sliced and peeled, revealing spectacular colors and smells inside. He suddenly had an acute sense of how thinly he was being held together. The fluorescent lights above him did not waver.

Returning to his belongings, he reached into his bag and found his little black notebook. Snatching it tenderly, Charles lifted the collection of failures to his face, smelled it deeply, paused, looked at it again, and threw it in to the trash.