The Pit

The bodies came in by the truckload and were dumped into a smoking pit. I stood nearby knowing what my job was and was forced to do it against my will. It was desperate times which called for insane measures and this was one of them. Another truck backed in and dumped more bodies into the pit. A bulldozer then pushed the bodies into a pyramid formation. All I could remember seeing were the heads of the innocent ones with vacant dead stares in their eyes. Their arms and legs limp from death and twisted into strange positions. And still more bodies came on the dump trucks. The bodies on the trucks were piled high, arms and legs hung over the edge like they were making one last attempt to crawl out. 

​I went inside the brick building to where the bodies were being hauled in. I stood at my position amongst the others and put on my gloves and grabbed onto my hook. All I could do now was wait. 

There was a buzzing noise and the first body came in through the doors. It was a male and he was on the rack and looked like he could still be alive. The rack stopped and a man with two massive electrical cables stood nearby and waited. He then walked up to the corpse on the rack and zapped him, burning off all of the hair. That was the first step. 

The rack continued on and stopped. A bearded man waited with a shotgun and pointed it to the corpse's forehead. The end of the barrel touched the corpse's skin and the bearded man pulled the trigger to make sure the corpse was dead. 

The limp corpse continued on down the line to where the body was tilted into a horizontal position face down. A massive barrel was slid under the suspended body and a man came out of the shadows and with one slice of a knife split the corpse's belly in two. The guts fell out and filled the barrel up to the brim. Another soul emerged from a corner, his smock bloodied and grabbed the barrel of guts and wheeled it away. 

I was the next one in line as the body on the rack was pulled back into the vertical position. I pulled up my gloves and pried open the mouth of the corpse and pulled out its tongue. I then stuck my hook into the back of the mouth where the tongue connected and with not so much as a twist of the wrist I ripped out the tongue and tossed it onto the pile with the others. 

The body moved on and from this point I was not sure what was going to happen to it next. Seconds late the next body came through the doors and the whole procedure started all over again. I did this twelve hours a day, six days a week for the last twenty years. I had hoped one day that the bodies would stop coming and I would be able to survive by other means. But this was the way it was. I was trapped in the assembly line of the slaughterhouse floor.

My daymare had ended and I came back to reality. I stood at my station at the meat packing plant.

The door buzzed and the next cow came through the slaughterhouse doors...