Not Fit for Birds

Daniel was tired of cleaning up intestines. The thresher was faulty, cutting up skin and muscle but leaving organs and softer tissue to gum up the machinery. He worked into the night, brushing by stalks of bodies fashioned from grafting people and corn together.

They screamed as he turned the machine back on, the gears once again spinning flesh into food.

He felt no connection, no familial or fraternal bond. These were engineered people, not real in any sense to him. He knew real people who starved to death after the blight. His father had been one of them.

Forgetting is painful. Daniel did not want to remember his father's bruised ribs, the concavity of his chest.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, walking back into the house where he wife sat, stirring an ancient pot full of stew. Small pieces of thigh and belly floated to the top.

She was a small round woman with the face of a moon maiden. She never seemed to smile but he didn't mind that.

"I miss the birds," he said.

They'd stopped coming around when he switched the crops. Nothing to eat for them he supposed though the ravens had sometimes come and made a mess of the eyes just for the hell of it. Animals avoided his farm. Or they were all dead. He wasn't sure which was worse.

W/C 229