Memory Meat

        Most nights I become the meat-grinder of memory. It is hard, dirty work. The blood of memory is always and forever fresh; bright red and hot enough to fog the windows.  I grind the meat by hand. I place the choicest cuts of memory in the grinder and begin to turn the hand crank. I do try and be considerate of each bloody hunk, but more often than not I realize I have a white-knuckle grip on the crank after only two or three revolutions and I cannot ever seem to feed the memorymeat into the grinder’s funnel fast enough. In the morning, I am steeped in the steaming blood of memory; there are thick red swathes across my face, scabs form and combine like red mercury throughout my hair, and there are dark red wet patches on my clothing. The patches under my arms and between my breasts look like the sweat stains of strained abscesses.  The remaining viscera from the freshly ground memory makes sucking sounds as I scuttle around the bloody floor on all fours to gather as much of the shredded memorymeat as I can before it is time for my day to begin.  With it, I mold raw hamburgers or a meatloaf for dinner, leaving the sinew and fat scraps out for the dogs.

         

    What has always bothered me is that no matter how much memory I grind, I never have any memorymeat left over to freeze for the next night’s dinner.  I always end up with just the right amount for that particular day.  It is a very strange thing, and I cannot figure why it must always be this way.

“I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl.”

-- Bjork