Working alone (fiction)

He steps back and cleans the knife on his left pant leg. Fishes in the left pocket of his heavy cotton weave coveralls for the whetstone. Spits on it, and slowly hones the blade. Finishing with the knifeblade, he looks at the hide now more than halfway peeled back, smiles, and stretches his back. It’s midmorning and he’s confident now that he can finish the work on his own.

Before dawn, the cool autumn air biting, he’d walked out with trepidation. It had been on his mind for more than a month, that this day, a date he’d set on his own as the target, the day he’d set aside for this job, was coming, and he dreaded it. Knowing there was no way around it really, but as rose from their bed, passed the open door of the boy’s room, he made coffee in the dark quiet of the still sleeping house. Then he stepped into the dark of the morning, and set himself to the work.

Relentless in his method he began and carried through each of the steps he’d laid out in his mind day after day for thirty days before. It was going to work. He believed it. Had gotten the tools and gear together: hooks, chains, ropes, saws, and of course, the knives. Especially the knives. In fact he’d spent a day with old man Heinrichs down the road a few miles learning how best to sharpen a knife. And how often to hone it, to keep the edge, and what was sharp, but not too sharp, which could do more damage sometimes. A misstep with a too-sharp blade could cause irrevocable damage, damage that, were he not working alone, could be managed. But he was going to do this solo. Was going to prove he could, to himself, to his family, to the neighbours.

And right now, at midmorning, the sun still climbing in the wan blue southeastern sky, with the body hanging half-skinned from the loader for anyone driving by to see, he turns and bends to wash his hands in the warm pink water of the wash bucket, adjusts his toque, takes up the once again sharp knife, smiles to himself and anyone else who might be watching, and sets to work again carefully working his way around the body, peeling back the hide reveal the cream-coloured fat and membranes, and beneath this the ruddy, still-warm muscle.

The work absorbs him again, so much that he fails to notice the boy come up and stand behind him to watch. So much that, when bent over, a fly lands on his neck, he doesn’t think to look, he just swipes at it with his right hand, still holding the knife. So intent, and the knife so sharp, that he hardly notices the resistance as the blade meets living flesh. The flesh of his flesh.