Butchery and Bigamy

This path took me past a butcher's shop. The butcher was a bigamist.
A big-timer in a small town. One wife was deaf, the other was blind.
Neither minded the smell of blood on his fingers. When he chopped up
the meat he protected head and feet with sou'wester and gum-boots, but
his hands he left bare. Quite simply, he liked the feel of flesh and
bone. He made no distinction between the cold bodies of dead animals
and the warm bodies of his living wives.

The deaf wife spent her days surfing. She had a fantastic figure, which
she showed off to full advantage in body-hugging neoprene. A trail of
perfume followed her through the wall of water, causing riptides and
undercurrents. It drove the male surfers to a frenzy but she was
oblivious to their cries. She only thought of the butcher's firm
fingers. The evenings she spent sewing. 'Thou sowest so finely', the
butcher would declare on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, his days of
visitation.

The blind wife waited her turn on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. She
had lost her sight three times in her life. Twice it had been
recovered, but the last operation was a botched job. They cut a vein
and now all she could see was the rusty red of blood and occasional
afterimages like aurora borealis. When the butcher came to see her he
made her tea and toast. Then he opened her apertures to the sound of
old '78s.

Sundays the butcher spent alone in a room at the back of his shop
reading the Illiad and sharpening his gloomy knives. At precisely
6.07pm he would drink an aperitif of bull's blood and vodka, put on his
long pink socks and conduct a ballet of mug shots tossed to the wind.
Apeman appellations and ballsy apalachians. Breaking crockery followed
by jiggerpokery. Glowing voles untidier than moles. Aural islas made
him ill but elastic.

The deaf wife's decorous needle conjured images of an elegant beach,
white sand swept each morning with a flat brush, no seaweed in sight.
Liquid thread caught shimmering cloth. A boat waited out in the flat
calm for her but without an active tide she could not reach it. She
thought about the butcher's lusty hand touching her clean salt-licked
leg, imagined lying on the hot table of his shop as he sliced
intransigent bacon.

The blind wife stroked her soft stomach and lovely throat. The
delirious door to her bewildered room slowly opened. As the butcher
raised his shiny cleaver to the icy carcass in his cold store a warm
wave of pleasure swept through her.