He remembered the gilt. Her eyes. Her question.
“He doesn’t owe us anything,” Eli whispered. “He’s just… here. For himself.”
He saw piglets having their tails cut off without anesthetic—to prevent “tail-biting,” a symptom of the very overcrowding the system demanded. He saw teeth clipped. He saw testicles ripped from screaming day-old males. He saw the “enrichment” he had fought for: a single, chewed-up rubber hose hanging in a pen of two hundred animals.
But the gilt’s eyes still haunted him.
What are you doing?
The old man’s name was Eli, and for forty years, he had worked the kill floor of the Meridian Valley Processing Plant. His hands, gnarled and scarred, knew the heft of a captive bolt gun better than they knew the face of his own granddaughter. He never thought much about it. The pigs came down the chute, squealing in a language of panic that he had long ago learned to translate as noise . You did the job. You went home. You drank whiskey until the sound faded.