Slaughterhouse Meat
Like a dying man’s reel of memories… the long chain of how I had ended up in this state flashed through my head, and at last it was over. Now it was time to come back to reality.
Maybe… when the recollection finished, I had hoped that, like in a comic, everything would snap back to normal as if it had all been someone else’s old story. But that absurdly convenient miracle never came. Sadly, that hell was still in progress—and it had barely even begun.
“Ghk… aaaaaaaaaagh…”
“Whoa! Fuck. What the hell is this?”
He spat something that was half swear, half stunned admiration, but it never reached my ears. All I could do was feel an unspeakable, vicious pain properly for once and scream a death cry that left me capable of nothing else.
It wasn’t the cute little “kyaa” people usually hear, or the tired, staged “haaahn” that always shows up in porn. It was closer to the strangled wail of someone at a traffic accident whose body has been crushed or shattered, a person who can’t even breathe right.
“It… hurts.”
I couldn’t even get that sound out properly. Or maybe I never said it with my mouth at all. Maybe I only thought it and imagined I had mumbled it. That was how far beyond anything I could name the pain was down there.
This had nothing to do with the cliché from the porn I used to snicker through as a man—hurts a little at first, then feels good later. Honest to what my body was telling me, it was… just the feeling of a knife being driven into flesh.
A blade longer and sharper than my own forearm, sinking into the most sensitive place on my body and punching clean through me—that was the only way I could describe it. The electric jolt I’d felt when he kissed me and touched my chest couldn’t even put its name on the same card.
It was like a killing blow delivered without the slightest regard for the other person’s state or feelings: something that had come up out of the unconscious and simply stabbed. That was how little care he showed as he drove it, in one merciless stroke, deep into the core of my body.
Was that why? From the tip of whatever had buried itself in the center of my lower belly, a signal of pain so absolute it felt like dying was screaming out in every direction through my head and my limbs. Run. You have to get away. You’re going to die like this. This is violence with clear murderous intent. So run, now.
“Can’t… right now… nothing…”
My mouth mumbled a stupid reply. And unfortunately, that was an entirely realistic conclusion. There was no love in it, no desire. It was just murder. A plain act of slaughter that hurled me onto the border of Thanatos until I could no longer tell whether I was alive or dead.
Against that violent, cruel act, I did exactly what I had already admitted to myself: nothing. Even the hands and feet that had been thrashing pointlessly a moment earlier… now only stretched out in every direction like broken twigs, twisting weirdly under the convulsions of pain.
I couldn’t even attempt resistance or escape against the person who was trying to kill me. All I managed were meaningless flails, as if each limb wanted to tear free of my body and save itself alone. My chest, by contrast, was almost a traitor.
My nipples had swollen to a size that looked grotesque even to me and stood stiff, reaching up as if begging the being above me who meant to murder me to destroy them too. And through my chest it was spreading a filthy desire that had no business existing in this situation.
Goddamn it… my body…
I even felt the urge, if I could, to bite them off with my own teeth and rip them free. That was how thoroughly I felt death under his assault. Maybe two or three seconds had passed? In that short span enough thoughts had flooded me that it truly felt no different from standing on the threshold of the underworld.
And then… the pain reversed. Not that it vanished. It came back the other way.
“Ugh… ghk… uuuuugh!”
“Whoa, shit. You’re clamping down hard. Loosen up a little, fuck.”
I remembered a scene from a nature documentary I used to watch with my son. A big fish speared by a fisherman’s harpoon. They hauled it onto the boat and yanked the spear free, and its guts came out with it, spilling into the open air. We had turned the TV off in a hurry.
Right now… that scene was replaying itself in my body. I clenched my teeth so hard I thought they would crack. Even then I couldn’t endure it. The instant he pulled the weapon he had driven into me back out, I felt my own organs snagging on the ridges of that foreign thing and being dragged along with it.
He gripped my legs, forced them bent and spread, and with sweat pouring off him he dragged it free. Under that cruelty I thrashed like the fish in the documentary, spewing a soundless, empty scream into the air. Please… stop. Just kill me cleanly instead.
But that wish of mine was not granted.
“Whoa… lady, what the fuck even are you? Shit, I’ve had every kind of woman in the world, but I’ve never met a crazy pot like this. You even human? You’re a goddamn research subject.”
“Please…”
“Huh? What?”
“Just kill me. I can’t… I can’t anymore…”
I meant it. Completely. Once the sensation of my guts being pulled out ended and his foreign object left my body, I was wrecked. There was no way my organs could still be intact. And at the same time, my mind had collapsed as well.
The words I had repeated over and over so I wouldn’t fall apart: I am a man.
Because of that, the situation I was in now—being raped by another man—was something I had no strength left to stand myself up against. The foul disgust of being sodomized, and the pain of the weapon that had violated my body and then withdrawn, left my head going white.
So the conclusion I reached was simple. Kill me. I’m begging you, kill me. Isn’t this enough misery already? Why do you keep shoving me into pain and snickering somewhere while you watch? How much further do I have to fall before this sick freak show ends? I can’t do any more.
I want to go back. Back to that moment a little while ago, watching the fish documentary with my son. But… if I can’t have that, then just kill me. Take that solid arm holding my ankle and put it around my throat. And for just a second… only a second, squeeze.
That’s all you have to do. And I won’t resent you for it at all. I’ll close my eyes truly grateful. Yes. End it now. I don’t want to live anymore. That was when it happened.
“Gyaaaaah! Ugh… why? Why the hell…”
“You asked me to kill you, right? Of course I will. Tonight I’m gonna kill you, lady. I’m properly in the zone today.”
My desperate inner voice came back as an act of pure nonsense. He drove his thing into me again, harder and more mercilessly than before. Being the second time did not make it familiar. No—it hurt more. Because he had gone even deeper.
What was burying itself deep inside me truly felt, no joke, like it was carving its way through my guts. It was writhing flesh, but my body registered it as a razor-edged blade. And to my shock I realized the first thrust had almost been merciful.
Because… at least then he had taken his time stabbing in and pulling out. From the second thrust on, there was no such mercy. My thighs were caught in his grip, one hand each. With me held wide so I couldn’t run, he began thrusting and withdrawing without restraint.
“No. Pl… please! Aaaaaaaagh!”
“Fuck, this is good. Real premium pot. To think I lived this long without knowing something like this existed—what a waste of a life.”
Nothing I said seemed to reach his ears. He only talked to himself, face twisted with arousal, lost in what he was doing to me. No—calling it assault wasn’t even right anymore. This was just one-sided slaughter.
I felt like a slab of meat laid out on a butcher’s block: hide stripped, body disassembled, blades driven into me and cutting me apart. My vision had already blurred until I could see nothing. My glasses must have gone flying somewhere.
My mouth had slipped free of control, silently pouring out worthless empty screams, unable even to close properly until the inside of it went bone-dry. I could still hear, but what registered more clearly than any real sound was the noise from inside my own body—organs being crushed and flattened, flesh being carved away.
The only sense still working properly was, cruelly, the sense of touch in my skin. It alone transmitted without filter the feel of his blades and the pain, sinking me deeper into the abyss beneath the sea of despair.
“Hah! Hah! Hah!”
That wasn’t my sound. It was the moan he was forcing out. He was a beast. No intellect, no humanity—just a cruel, violent, merciless wild animal. And for some reason that animal seemed satisfied with the prey it had successfully hunted.
His thick, muscular frame was soaked in sweat, the tattoos carved into his skin gleaming wetly as he poured everything into butchering the catch he held. Every time he moved, a thick male stench poured from the glands all over his body.
I could see it.
Compared to him I was a thin, indecisive male. Or was “male” even the right word? Maybe from the day this whole misfortune started… the moment my wife kicked me in the crotch… I had already been castrated. Had I already lost the right to call myself a male from that point on?
No… maybe even earlier than that. A mother who vanished, a father who was only terrifying. Maybe back in that childhood I always thought of as miserable, I had already been castrated in spirit. Ah… yes. That might be closer to the truth.
Otherwise… a proper man would never end up going through something this insane, would he? Maybe I had already lost myself back then. And that was why… I was here in this shape, this state, suffering this on a grimy motel bed. Maybe this was the form I had always deserved.
As that thought crossed my mind, a scene that could have been reality or delusion unfolded before my eyes.
I was there in the dark. Ah… me from when I was still a man. A little scrawny, but still the head of a household who worked diligently at the company and looked after his family. And then that version of me began taking his clothes off, one piece at a time. Why? Before long I was naked.
A bitter laugh escaped me. A skinny body with almost no muscle. Even I could see it was a failure as a man. Was that why? His body began to change. The chest swelled, not dramatically but unmistakably; the waist narrowed; the hips grew. And at the same time the male genitals… were removed.
Not the naïve, gradual absorption you see in comics. As if cut away with a knife, the penis and testicles were severed, and that frail man rolled his eyes and went mad. And in the place where they had been gouged out, a deep cleft appeared… a blood-soaked female sex, and he became a woman.
And that was none other than myself.
Heh. Heh heh heh… Yes… that was it. No matter how many times I told myself otherwise out loud, from the start I had been neither man nor woman… just castrated meat. So of course… ending up like this was only natural.
In a world of the strong eating the weak, what was wrong with finding a helpless slab of meat that had been thrown down and taking it apart? Yeah… this guy has no sin. The one who’s wrong is me. Thinking that, even with death right in front of me, I laughed. And then the male’s voice reached me.
“Lady, you laughing? You like it?”
Ah… why would he bother? No need to worry about the meat planted on the chopping board. But the male seemed concerned about something; he brought his face close over mine. My vision was too blurred to see anything, but I could tell by the smell of cigarettes. And moisture pushed into my dry mouth.
“Mmph…”
I didn’t know why he did it. But with his blade still buried deep inside me, the predator pressed his mouth to mine as well. And little by little, my consciousness drifted away into the far distance beyond.