Deliver Me by Elle Nash EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Elle Nash
- Language: English
- Genre:Women’s Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
First Trimester
XXXX
The factory is a fertile body, each breast a beginning. I make geometry of
the meat and that keeps my mind in line—calming, comforting tenders and
perfect fingers, my pneumatic scissors make sense of the mess. It’s ten to
four when I arrive on the floor in my sexless scrub top and Number Five is
pissed. I slip on my disposable arm wraps, then tie my plastic apron behind
my back. Everything that drops into our section is mostly peach with pale
yellow lumps of fat. Thank God there is no blood. When I’m not at work, I
remember moving the length of my fingers over each smooth breast, feeling
for the catch of bone or a string of tendon against my latex glove.
Number
Five catches me missing a breast and shouts. I look up, then cut faster to
catch up. Trembling flesh flops and tumbles down a conveyer belt at 140
birds or more a minute, and I cut, cut, throw the pieces into wide emerald
vats to be sorted. It’s hard to focus, and sanitizer fogs my eye protection.
This morning the sky was July clear, and as I walked through the glass
doors glittering with dawn light, I knew something was different, couldn’t
stop squeezing the skin of my stomach. In the locker room, I pressed my
hands deep into my hips, searching for the nubs of my pelvis through the
surrounding paunch of my sore, spongy fat.
During first break I swallow back the nausea worming up my throat. I
step outside and walk past the rows of parked cars, the sun barely rising and
the constellation fading out in the north. Momma calls it the Northern
Cross. “God is watching over us,” she would say, but when I moved out and
got the internet I looked it up. It’s not a cross but a swan in flight. The air
outside is normally swollen with blood and animal waste, but today it
smells earthy, like wild grass and fresh milk. The mild country across the
highway is peppered with paste-colored double-wides, old barns, twined
bundles of hay, our factory nestled neatly between that and a few acres of
chicken farms—if you can call them that. Oblong, warehouse-sized huts
with thousands of clucking broilers breathing in their shit.
We’re the kill
station. The biggest poultry supplier to Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
When first break is over, workers sort into their sections like marbles
rolling toward one uneven end. Number Three shows up next to me.
“Good morning, Number Four.”
I nod and cover my nose with my paper mask. My hunger prods, and
pressure in the muscle of my jaw, below my tongue, makes me salivate. A
bloat sits below my belly button, achy and full. I try to remember the last
time I bled. Three weeks, maybe. It’s never been regular, sometimes it takes
months, but always I’m thinking, She’s here again. Inside me.
An alarm
rings and the assembly line clunks on, first from the adjacent warehouse
rooms, then ours. Air hisses through the hose of my scissors, and I ready the
blades by schlicking them open and shut a few times. For the rest of the day
I cut and cut and cut.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB