Wiener Factory

Wiener Factory

There was a metallic clang, followed by an electric pop, and the line ground to a jarring halt. Something sizzled, and a plume of smoke rose from the central gearbox.  Immediately the blood stopped flowing through the blood-trough; the meat stopped grinding in the grinder and squeezing into the slippery tubes of salted intestine in the filler; the bones stopped clattering around and breaking up into chalky dust in the pulverizer. The whole system stopped.

Alarms sounded. Phones rang. People yelled at each other over intercoms and across the airwaves. Executives demanded answers. 

The plant manager slammed his phone into its cradle and emitted a ferocious roar. He stormed from his office and pounded down the stairs. His round face was ablaze with anger, slowly going from pink to a deep, dark purple. Now his phone began to chirp, but he ignored it.

“Nathan!” he bawled. “Why is my line shut down?”

The stout, balding man charged through the plant, arms pumping, face red, shoving aside mask-wearing, white-coated employees whose faces he couldn’t stand to look upon.  His mind never registered the change that his staff had undergone, or the grunts that left their throats; he wore his anger like blinders over his bifocals.  He followed the chute that contained the swine that were standing still and grunting, instead of plodding obediently toward their slaughter.  In his mind’s eye he was counting off the seconds in dollars, kissing his quarterly bonus good-bye. In his mind’s eye the swine were on all fours, not standing upright and glowering at him.

“Nathan?  Answer me, God damn you!”

He burst through the double-doors to the exsanguination room and pushed past more hulking, aimlessly meandering workers.  He noticed they all seemed to have put on weight, and resolved to take a hard look at the inventory.  Thievery would not be tolerated. 

“Nathan?”

Nathan appeared before him, grinning, his butcher's whites a study in blood-spatter.  He wore a pig's carcass over his shoulders like some macabre Neanderthal hunter's shawl. 

The plant manager stopped in his tracks, surveying the grotesque scene before him.  Plant workers dangled, twitching, from meat hooks, blood-filled barrels on the floor beneath them--all but one, who was busy binding up the machinery with his mangled, bony corpse.

Pigs, wearing human faces like masks, moved in and surrounded him, grunting, squealing.

"We’re tweaking the recipe a smidge," Nathan said, as he slid a barrel under an empty hook. The pig-men fell upon the plant manager, dragging him forward.  The plant manager screamed as they drove the hook through his pelvis, and again, only louder, when they opened his stomach and began uncoiling his intestines.  He only fell silent—but for a faint gurgling noise—when at last they slit open his jugular, and his blood spilled into the barrel beneath him.

The pig-men oinked in pleasure.

"Now, now, my friends," Nathan said, calming the raucous crowd. "What shall we call our new creation?"

The pigs traded looks, and made low grunting noises at each other. Finally, one by one, they began nodding. At last, one of them, their spokes-pig, turned to Nathan and squealed once, very loudly.

Nathan beamed. "Why, I'm flattered," he said, wiping a tear from his eye, and leaving in its place a streak of  blood. “Truly honored.”