#56 “Good Things”
Sheila looked into the mirror and adjusted her short, chin length hair. It fell back from her face in perfect waves, thanks to an easy maintain haircut. She smiled at her reflection and continued to fidget with her appearance, although it wasn’t needed. Everything about her was impeccable, from the perfectly ironed suit that she was wearing to her gleaming jewelry. One deep breath to calm her nerves and she headed downstairs to her kitchen.
The kitchen was Sheila’s haven, all of her tools were in perfect order and the kitchen’s layout was such that it was maximized for ease of use. The surfaces sparkled, thanks to an all natural detergent that she made herself once a month and used to wipe the kitchen down before bed. Coffee was already percolating on the stove, the coffee having been hand ground as she needed it on her mother’s hand turned coffee grinder as electric grinders could effect the taste of the coffee. The oven was preheating and the butcher block sat in wait for her, with her knives gleaming in the early morning sun against the blonde pine of the countertop. All in all, it was as her mentor and role model always said, “a good thing.”
She rolled her sleeves up to her elbows and set to work. First she took a clean rag from the drawer by the sink and wet it, then turned to the meat on the butcher block. She hummed to herself as she drew the rag from her husband’s forehead to his chin, starting at his head and working her way to his feet, cleaning his skin. Somewhere around the time she got to his torso, he woke up and began to struggle against the ties that held him down to the butcher block.
“If I told you once, Nathan, I told you a hundred times or more– if I ever found out that you were cheating on me–” she paused to check the ties on his ankles, noting with a cool eye that her knots were definitely looking much better with practice. “Anyhow, I have the church chili cookoff coming up this weekend and I can’t very well have you showing up with that… tart you’ve been seeing for the last month or more.”
Nathan looked up at his wife in her flawless outfit, his eyes widening as she lifted his ankles and began to affix them to a foot long piece of PVC pipe. He thrashed madly against his bonds and screamed, his gag muffling the screams. It was useless.
She smiled beatifically down at him as she began talking aloud.
“The first step of butchery is to lift the carcass by its feet,” she began to tie a rope around the pipe and wind it over the huge pot hook above the butcher block. “This is extremely important as the second part is to bleed the carcass in a controlled manner.” A grunt of effort matched her movements as she began to back away from Nathan, tugging on the rope and lifting him into the air by his legs.
“Blood can be used for very many things, from cooking to fertilizer,” she slid a 12 quart soup pot under her husband’s head. “Using a larger pot than necessary helps contain the blood, and decreases the amount of cleanup needed afterwards.” With a steady hand and a cheery hum she took up her fillet knife and scored his neck deeply. His blood flowed in a rich river out of his neck and into the soup pot. Some blood spattered across the front of her blouse at first and she frowned for a moment before commenting, “hmm, which would be better? Cold water…” Tapping the bloody fillet knife to her lips she pondered how to best remove the stain and waited as the blood letting tapered off.
Sheila spent the remainder of the day butchering her husband. His head, feet, and hands went into a chicken wire box that she had built the previous weekend and buried in the compost heap, preventing wild animals from being able to carry them off. The skin she flayed and ground up into a fine meal, which she fed to the dogs. His organs were thrown into the compost heap and bones boiled along with the tougher cuts of meats along with a selection of organically grown vegetables from her garden, boiled down into a rich, glossy broth.
The rest of him was ground up with extra lard, spices, and a selection of herbs. 170lbs of human male reduced to roughly 35lbs of ground meat, and it was sitting in ten Tupperware containers stacked two tall in a row of five in the bottom of her fridge, waiting to be made into chili over the coming weekend.
With the kitchen gleaming from her nightly cleaning, Sheila stepped into the bathtub upstairs. A slick pool of lavender oil swirled about under the bubbles as she descended under the water and relaxed. The clothing she wore was soaking in cold water in her laundry room, the kitchen was clean and ready for the morning, and her refrigerator was stocked full of fresh meat. Even better, her husband– the lying cheating bastard– was now gone forever, without a trace of him to be left behind. It was a good thing.