Offcuts

My dad always regales people with the witty tale of when he brought a raw grey chicken home from work and showed me up its slack-skinned arse. He stuck his hand up firmly up the shaft and chased me round the kitchen with it, making hysterical clucking and gobbling noises. That was really odd behaviour.

At work, dad used to wear white coats made from clingy acrylic. They were his standard uniform with press stud buttons that cracked like bones when he unbuttoned. There was always a bundle of his uniforms in the laundry pile giving off chilly waves of iron filings and sawdust. It was as though he crawled out of the innards of a gut every night. His curl-toed leather work shoes were covered in grimy meat dust, woolly scraps of mincemeat clung to the laces. Whenever we dragged the clothes out of the drier, his coats were persistent stalkers that clung to tights and anything made from Lycra. Because they were cheaply cut, the sleeves on his coats were obscenely short and the missing fabric made exhibits of his unusual wrists. I’d know his wrists in a police line up. Thick wrists with small bones. Work that out. Conker brown and black hair studded. Blunt fingernails that spoon at the ends. His veins stand out like mine in blue ropes. At the knuckle lines, he's got pronounced backwards e shapes on every finger.  The hands that tickled me to hysteria also sawed through ligaments and bones for a living. I’ve never given a shit about animal welfare. If you can't cut your own meat off the bone without curling your top lip, eat something else. The act of cutting made me flinch, though. Dismembering. No matter how many washes those white coats had, I could always see the jets of blood. A startling brightness, red scattered across white like wild pigs had rutted on his chest.

Comments

works for me Vera. A lively butchering bunch of prose.

 

Thanks, celtic. No idea why I've gone all meat.