(Trigger warning- for multiple triggers throughout)
I used to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere USA. The entire civilization of the place was built on and around the hand full of companies that set a headquarters or a major factory within its borders.
There was a baby formula factory at the Southend, most of the less physically strong worked her eas it was mostly flipping switching vats to draw one substance into another.
In the North, there was a decent-sized lumber mill, most of the prime men worked there as it was labor-intensive, and every year one or two workers would be killed or maimed by a user error accident.
Then finally to the west was the sausage factory.
This wasn’t a name-brand meat plant, the sausages it made were instead sold to big companies and bulk buyers for commercial uses. If you didn’t work in the factory, the mill, or any of the small mom and pop shops that lazily dotted the landscape, you worked at the plant.
The building was large and dystopian. On its shell was a patchy and old paint job that carelessly covered the basic white concrete with a dull grey. It had new-looking silvery pipes that jutted out in just about every way that could be imagined then they reentered but meer feet from where they would originate.
If one stared at the hulk too long they would feel a sense of cosmic boredom and smallness, as if staring at a primed canvas a mile high that would refuse any stench of pigment to be thrown its way.
Around its perimeter was an old barbed fence that barely held itself together. If one were to climb it they would likely rather fear the thing breaking beneath them than to be cut by any barb.
Once a day a blue truck would come in and then come out but an hour later. On the same day, a yellow truck would do the same. Over and over the beast cranked its great line, pumping out barely organic processed meat tubes to be sent nowhere of particular interest to anyone in our town.
My father worked in the plant as he was injured in an accident in the mill, cutting off three fingers from his left hand and two from his right. This made him unable to work at the factory so he was forced to punch his card every morning in the great city of flesh.
My mother worked as a school teacher and my older siblings would always be at school so around my youngest days I would spend my time in the child lock in the factory.
All the kin of the poor souls were put into the same small room with a broken rocking hour, a faded pastel blue wall with badly painted clouds, the rest were painted in a semi-fresh looking lupin grey. In the corner always sat old miss Drent, her old crooked nose sat out of shape with the rest of her scoffed face, in her sense of priority over others she would always appear to balance a small object on her chin and would watch us while looking down the side of her nose that didn’t cover her eye.
She was a mean banshee of a woman, beating us at any conceived slight and telling our fathers that we had been behaving the entire time leading us to a second far more brutal in its undeservedness and rash.
I would suffer through this wench’s abuse until I was old enough to be educated. For a solid eleven grades, the plant had ever come to mind, my head blocking my old caretaker’s actions from me.
This was until my senior year when I blew my tests, I decided that another year was beyond my ideals and I dropped out. My father, being a dropout himself, did not bring himself to anger, rather he sighed and told me to stay in the house I would have to work or go back to school. My decision was made the next morning when I filled out the employment slip and received my job at the plant at the age of seventeen.
I have put on loading duty at first, I would take the boxes from the blue truck, filled with assorted offcuts from pigs, cows, chickens, and anything else with meat, and put them into the bay for the machine men to process, then taking the filled boxes of sausage and putting them into the yellow truck to be shipped elsewhere.
I did this for several years and saw several disgusting things myself. The delivery and pick-out trucks were filthy, covered with rats and waste undoubtedly tainting every box to an ungodly degree.
I would be forced to hold my upchuck as I witnessed food that I and many others I have known had eaten in the past be disgustingly crammed into abhorrent containers of rot and filth.
After many more months of this work, I was replaced by someone bigger and more willing than myself, rather than fire a loyal and cheap worker employee the managers decided to put me to work as a machine loader.
I would take the boxes from the bay filled with meat and put them into the machines. I would toss every chunk, strip, morsel, fat roll, and any other shape or type of meat one could imagine onto that belt and watch as the mechanical magic worked the misfitting pieces into perfect little links.
I would do this all day, I had a friend in this job, his name was Silas. He was a fair-skinned man, of slight and mouse-like build, his features seemed more akin to a rodent than a man.
He was kind and social, considered a friend by just around everyone in the factory, he was no-nonsense as well, never taking an offense lying down, I remember he once knocked out a loader’s tooth for stealing his sandwich, an action he did swiftly and with little compassion.
One day I remember coming into work late due to some other work that had to be done during my shift. It was around lunchtime when I started, taking the grave yard’s slot as I did my usual job of tossing the boxes worth of slop onto a conveyer belt, part way through one of them though there was some difficulty, I was able to stop the mache and clear the jam. Just some small bones that got caught in the teeth.
Midway through my work, I was interrupted by a loud scream from the boss’s office. I went to check, trying to see if my payer was still alive. I was met by Silas being pushed out the door, clutching his right hand rigidly as he ran. The next day when I went in and Silas wasn’t on the other side of me like normal.
I didn’t question, he was probably fired for being stubborn one too many times. I didn’t question anything at least until the end of my shift, I was the last one in the plant and was about the leave when the boss pointed out two more boxes I needed to put into the machine.
The boxes didn’t come from the bay, they were a different size and had a different branding than the usual. He told me to unload one before the other so I did.
Out of the crate came a cavalcade of dead rats spilled from the box. The smell of their rotting rodent corpses assaulted my nose and before I start loading I threw up on the belt but before I could go to remove it and have it cleaned a gun was put to me.
“Turn on the machine David,” the boss said to me, a decently sized handgun pointed at my head.
I refused to argue, flipping the switch, the rats were brought to the grinding mouth and were turned to paste with my vomit as they were converted to sausage.
“Now, you’ve seen the rodents… prepare for their king,” he said, gesturing to the second, larger, heavier box.
I popped it open just before pouring it, inside was the naked body of Silas, covered in bruises and cuts, several bullet holes darted around his corpse.
“Look into his eyes David,” he said “LOOK AT THEM,” he yelled, touching the edge of the barrel to the back of my head. I stared deeply into the blank and unfeeling eyes of Silas before me.
“Last night your friend here was supposed to pour out that box himself, once he saw what was inside he refused and sealed it back up. I and a few men cut off his fingers to let him know who was in charge, they were in that batch that jammed the machine,” he said, staring into his eyes with me. I hit my knees thinking of what I had done.
“You see, Silas doesn’t have any family, no one to threaten to keep him silent, so I thought to myself, dead rats don’t squeal,” he adjusted slightly behind me.
“But you David, you have people,” he continued “Your weak and broken father, he works at packing, doesn’t he? Your beautiful mother works as a teacher at Westbrook, I own that school David, I own her. Oh wait, you’re little sister Beth, just turned eighteen last month right?” I twitched when he said her name.
“She’s your only sister who still lives here right, Your mother really knows how to grow em’, it’d be a shame if mommy, daddy, and big brother all lost their jobs, Beth might have to work at Ms. Gills hotel, hell if she’s working there I might have to book a priv-.” I cut him off by pouring the box into the machine.
“Good boy, no one saw this,” he said, I nodded in agreement and he left.
Several times I would have to stop and unjam the grinder as it made its way through the body. The head was ground up last, Silas’s eyes stared dagger through me as I continually had to pull and push him out, terror filling my heart as every moment set in concrete my actions. Once he was finished the shipment was packed and I went home.
The next morning I went downstairs for breakfast before work, I heard the sound of frying meat as Beth was cooking for us.
A plate of sausage and eggs was placed before me.
“I thought we were out of sausage,” I said to my father.
Who after taking a sip from a cup of coffee replied: “I was working late last night, last shipment was too small to be sent off so the boss said us packing boys could split it between ourselves.”
Knowing the batch I quickly thought of excuses for my family that would work to not draw suspicion to me about it, I had also loved sausage so me not eating it would be considered strange, for my sister’s sack I didn’t want that to be the case.
I looked into the slender piece of meat like I was once again looking into the eyes of Silas, and painfully took a bite.