CUT THE BRINE

Cut the legs off, she says. Vivisect the limbs. Saw off its horns, grind them to a powder. Gouge out its eyes, grind them to a paste. Wrench out its teeth, dice the tongue. Take off its head, tan the hide. Take out the guts and jar the offal.

Her voice rings out. Every command is sharp like a bell. There is money to be made, wages to pay, and a long way to sail. She has customers lined up for every little part of this abomination. 

The boat sways heavy with the weight of the large monster dumped on the ship deck. It is vaguely squid like, with frills and tentacles and a toothed beak, though two large clawed limbs lay twisted by its sides. The deckhands toil, back bent and carving knives in hand, sweat rolling down their backs in pearly rivulets. The deck is slick with viscera, the grate shut so as to not leak into the hull below. There in the dark the steel containers bubble and foam as they are being filled. Empty containers wait, lids up, a yawning mouth open like a coffin. The sickly sweet smell of chemicals settles in the fabric, the steel, the iron and the wood.

The mast creaks above her. The ropes sway. Keep the liver for me, she says, and she retreats to her quarters.

—

The fatty liver was not trimmed. A sheen layer of blubber lays like a veil draped on the meat. It sits unceremoniously on a gold rimmed ceramic plate, brine beginning to pool underneath the shiny black of it. It reflects the candle light, the last of an evening sun. Above her, the sound of labor. Below her, the sound of the Rithan sea lapping at the boat.

 Below that, nothing.

She cuts into it with a long knife, the curve of it sickle shaped and silver. Sharp enough to cut a feather under its own weight, it peels the meat apart effortlessly. Every cut reveals the vivid technicolor crystalline marbling that runs throughout. A living thing.

She cuts off a thin slice. It is almost translucent. 

Below her golden heavy garments, from her throat down to her gut, the layers of her skin have turned clear like glass. The long loops of her ribs stretch over her bubbling black lungs and attach to her broad sternum. A black heart struggles with every beat, clusters of pustules latched on the connective tissue like little barnacles. Pearls, wrapped around an oyster’s sediment. The leak of when they burst settle in the hollow of her heart’s chambers. 

She swallows. The monster's the man’s liver goes down smooth.

Her kidney, stomach, the weight of her liver sit heavy and sticky in the slick cavity of her lower body. Underneath, her intestines blindly writhe like headless worms, the bulk of fatty larvae. Swollen and distended. All of it, black and iridescent, the color of a beetle’s shield, a sad bug curled up inside her body. Strung between her bones. Her body thrums with a feverish and heady heat. 

She keeps eating. Terrible things between her teeth, calcified in her molars.