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The Bright Side of Hell, Chapter 1 “Feed the hole,” they say. Never do they mean the one plunged deep in the Knocker’s forehead like the dilated pupil of an unblinking third eye peering inward into knitted scar tissue and irreparable brain damage. An inverted eye that, from time to time, still weeps blood. They say he tried to kill himself but he was already dead. Of course they say a lot of things in the SS. Everyone but the Knocker. The Knocker rarely speaks, least of all in that tense confessional circle of disfigured butchers and dead souls. No one is supposed to call it the SS but everyone does. The support group is for Slaughterhouse Survivors but it’s only ever the men and women in uniform who survive. Most of them anyway. None of them intact. Along with the dime-sized hole punched in his meaty noggin, the Knocker is missing one actual eye, evidenced by the counterfeit glass that doesn’t match the color or movement of his one real bulging eyeball. He stares as only he can, through the queasy dead eyed triangle defacing the front of his leathering bald head, across the circle at a slighter man who’s only just realized he’s being watched. Tonight Skinner’s got the squeaky seat. Words are spilling from his mouth but he has no idea what he’s saying. He’s rambling. Out of body. Disassociating again. He catches himself. His words sputter and disintegrate. The SS is where Skinner met the Knocker, more or less, but they know each other’s joyless mugs from Manslaughterhouse. No one is supposed to call it that. Mann’s Slaughterhouse isn’t much better, but that’s what people have called the local death factory for decades. Before anyone ever suggested slaughterhouse work might be traumatizing. Before the biblical floods and droughts and wildfires and ice storms. Before the last few flus and the culling. Even before the Virginless Birth. They say the Knocker witnessed that miracle on the kill floor. Some say that’s when he tried to cap himself. Right then and there. With his captive bolt pistol. Skinner has never witnessed a miracle himself but he’s experienced more than any sane person’s share of carnage. Even in his sleep, his mind twinges with ingrained and routine violence. Trembling faces. Big tearing eyes. Rivers of blood. Screaming. “I used to feel bad for the meat,” he blurts. “Now I just feel bad for me.” “It’s a dirty job,” someone says. “But someone’s gotta do it,” the SS chants in unison. Skinner glances at the defeated faces around him, his compatriots and peers, their wincing ticks, slack jaws and bleeding gums, all gathered and slumped under the harsh overhead basement light. Most of their scars aren’t even visible. A few of these hopeless dregs he still sees at work. Others he spots begging for change off interstate ramps, shambling around shanty tents, or in chemical comas on bus benches. Rendered useless, even before they lost their minds or their jobs. The local death factory is still operational, but nowadays it’s a skeleton crew. Skinner’s lucky to still have a job, so they say. Before he can finish picturing everyone decapitated, Skinner looks down at the calloused hands curling in his lap. He doesn’t recognize them at first, but he’s sure they’re his own. He used to wave with the right one, years ago when he was young and unmangled. Now he’s missing his right pinky and the first knuckle of the neighboring ring finger. He’d be missing half that hand’s skin, too, if it weren’t for the patchwork skin grafts. A rough swatch of grain now runs a few degrees off, along with the coarse hairs that aren’t quite the right color. He’s aware his red right hand is ghoulish, and so he never waves. When he sees people he knows, the most he can muster is a nod. Some nod back. Others only shudder. The Bright Side of Hell, Chapter 2 Not so many hours later, Skinner punches in and walks out of the slaughterhouse. It’s 6:00 AM and still dark outside. In the old days, which weren’t so long ago, there’d already be screaming in the small hours. Nowadays, without livestock, the mornings are quiet. Without livestock, there’s less stress. Nowadays, all the meat is free-range. Out back, a white van sits washed and waiting for Skinner in the loading bay. The magnetic signs slapped on the windowless hull change daily but never suggest he’s a butcher. Each day, he passes for something more pleasant. A humble plumber or carpet installer or a carpenter, like Jesus. He knows there are other kinds of people, but he can only imagine what his life might’ve been if he was born someone else. If he hadn’t been raised in a small town built around a slaughterhouse. Not that there weren’t other employers, least for a while. There used to be a greasy spoon. A few liquor stores. A cluster of gas stations serving fast food right off the highway. But in Skinner’s experience, or at least in his ignoble youth, all the decent jobs were forever filled. The slaughterhouse was always chewing through everyone. Skinner always thought he would’ve killed himself by now. But here he is, a human shell, doing his part to keep America fed, so they say. Leather squeals as he scoots in behind the steering wheel. On the dash sits a cap he assumes matches the signage on the van. He puts it on. Turns the key that’s already in the ignition and so on, going through the same motions eight days a week, puppeteered by muscle memory and routine. He punches the radio preset to 78.9 Breeze FM. The best adult contemporary soft rock from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and whatnot. More than half a century of innocuous tunes. “Do you believe in love? Do you believe it’s true?” Skinner drives down a dusty local road lined with buildings abandoned by everyone but opioid zombies and ferals. Two of the ruins used to be rival bars, one favored by workers from the cut floor and one by workers from the kill floor. Tensions between the cutters and the killers have always run high, with one side always blaming the other for mishaps and holdups and gushing accidents, for the occasional escapee. Someone once tried to tell Skinner that violent work breeds violence outside of work. That was after his mother died. By his father’s hand. Back when his father had the Knocker’s job. Last Skinner heard, his father had hanged himself in prison. For all he knows, his father’s carcass could still be swaying in his cell like a side of beef. You butcher thousands of animals a day, day after day after day, and life loses all value. When you think about it, the death of a human animal isn’t so unthinkable. Soon the sun bleeds into another dawn. Skinner nearly pokes himself in the eye fumbling on a pair of gas station sunglasses with one hand. The lenses already fingered and smudged. In the outer corner of one lens, where he thought it said RayBan, it says RayBies. Subliminal evidence someone somewhere in a sweatshop has a sense of humor, if nothing else. He exits the highway and pulls into a parking lot filled with work trucks and cargo vans, most of them white. The hardware superstore is already bustling with tradespeople and contractors all gearing up to build and rebuild the American dream. As he pulls up along the curb and stops, ragtag day laborers posture and flex, jockeying for position like rough trade prostitutes in second- and third-hand clothes scavenged from first-world cultural refuse. Faded logos and corporate cartoon characters. Smiles meant to mask desperation. Skinner tugs the brim of his cap down snug over the cheap plastic imposter shades and leans over from behind the wheel. He turns the radio down but keeps the passenger window up, letting himself be further obscured by hectic reflections and bouncing light. He sees no white faces on the curb. Not today. Not most days. Not that he’d ever pick up anyone he might be related to, even at a distance. In his experience, white day laborers tend to be addicts and alcoholics and out on parole. Sooner or later, someone will come looking for them. Safer to assume all the brown faces are undocumented. Undocumented means no paper trails. No police. No supply shortage, as those people are always spilling over the southern border. Skinner has his pick of the litter. Even so, pickings are slimmer by the day. There aren’t quite as many grunts today as when he started making the rounds however long ago. Grunts being what his coworkers have taken to calling immigrants. He knows the slang is supposed to dehumanize them, but he still sees them as human, or least as Mexican. He likes to think of them as Mexican but really they could be from further south. Nicaragua. Venezuela. Brazil. He doesn’t discriminate. He just likes seeing their brown faces light up when they’re deemed his chosen.