Fresh Meat
A Short Story
Trigger Warning: this short story contains profanity and violence.
~Fresh Meat~
When I told my mother I was moving to the city, she said I was moving to the jungle.
“I’m twenty-six! I have to live on my own. Start my life. Make new friends. Make money. Make a name for myself,” I said.
“Fresh meat,” she said.
I walk quickly through the wide streets, going to meet the new friends. It’s night, but I carry a thermos of hot coffee because the evening is just getting started. Too hot to drink though. I scalded my tongue in the apartment. These are the moments I remember that conversation with her; at night. Not in the morning when the day is raw and still dripping in the pink blood of birth when sleepy twenty-somethings walk their dogs and curl over their lattes and avoid eye contact.
No, I think of her words now, as I walk, a woman with a purpose, a mission, down the wide street at night. A million eyes look down on me, gleaming from glassy skyscraper windows. How many people are still up there working or watching? Birds of prey looking for that foolish twenty-six-year-old woman who has decided to walk the jungle at night by herself. How many predators?
Though, to be sure, my most immediate concern is the men on the street. The homeless ones, or the professionals out for a beer after a long day of work. I’ve seen the movies, I know how it works, so I walk with purpose. I walk fast. Projecting confidence. Projecting business. Projecting “bitch who owns this city.”
The air is warm and I glide along, past a man curled against the wall surrounded by cardboard and a shopping cart piled high with changes of clothes, with a dog curled up next to him. Further down I pass two men who sit on a park bench beneath some trees. Just sitting there, not bothering anybody, not talking, just sitting. Waiting? I’m gone, past them in moments, too fast for them to register. Too fast to become a target. Too fast to become prey.
Abruptly, there are men before me, just exiting from the western-themed bar. They are tall, wearing collared shirts. Finance bros. They meander as if they’re just enjoying an evening in the city, as if it isn’t dangerous, as if this place isn’t a jungle, which, I suppose, for them, it isn’t.
When there’s enough space on the sidewalk, I speed past them, only to get trapped by another pair of slow-walking men. They came over from the last cross street, but then it dawns on me: maybe they know the men behind me. Maybe they timed this, like a car crash for an insurance payout. Trapping a twenty-something, luring her into a false sense of security, and then, wham: fresh meat.
I scan my person for something, anything I can use to defend myself. Just my bag. No pepper spray, no alarm, though I suppose the pen would do. It’s got no ink in it, but it’s sharp and pointy. At the moment, I don’t need it to write, just be sharp and pointy and unexpected if someone should lash out at me. That might buy me a couple of seconds to scream and run.
I speed past the men, who continue ambling behind me and release a sigh. No insurance crash. But the immediate threat makes me reassess my state.
The pen, the pen would work. I should hold it in my hand, clicking it into its “sharp and pointy” position and making it clear that this woman knows how to handle herself with the pen. Look bigger. More threatening. Not such an easy kill. Except I’m still holding the coffee so that will make it challenging to get to the pen out in time.
Of course! The coffee sits in my hand, piping hot in the thermos. I haven’t sipped it since leaving the apartment, so intent was I on moving fast. Hot coffee. Um, yeah, that ought to do it.
From my left, a bundle of clothes lunges at me. I don’t move, so startled. This is my imagination, surely. But the stink is real, attacking my nose with the stench of rotting sweat and feces just before the man stands in front of me, yelling. Screaming.
“Bitch! Bitch! You think you can just walk here?”
His face is the over-tan of a man who lives in the corridors of glassy eyes, without ever the reprieve of privacy. Scrabbly hairs smudge his face, though I can’t tell the hair from the dirt from the crazed gleam in his pupils. Broken, blackened teeth gnash at me as he screams that I am the cause for all his pain, all his trauma, that he is hungry and I am a bitch.
I back up, heart stuttering, but he lunges closer, screaming. A glass wall, translucent, clean, and perfect, behind me; a screaming stinking man before me. My hands shake, hot coffee leaking from the lid.
“Back up.” Fear squeezes my voice into a constricted cord.
“Bitch! Bitch! This is my sidewalk! You think you can just walk here?”
There is shouting elsewhere, but my entire world narrows onto this moment.
“If you don’t backup, I am going to throw my coffee on you,” I say, voice clear.
He screams. I remove the lid. He lunges at me again, his hand reaching for my wrist. I throw the coffee, tilting the thermos so a stream of boiling black arches between us.
His curdling cry steamrolls the sizzle.
The coffee strikes him him full in the face. He falls back, thrashing. He screams like a goat slowly butchered.
The distant yelling lands. Men running. Men in uniforms. One pushes me back, keeping me pressed against the glass eye, the thermos hanging empty from my hand. He doesn’t look at me, he watches the dirty man rolling on the ground, hands shaking over his face. Another uniform crouches over him, hands splayed, unsure what to do.
“Sir? Sir!”
The homeless man screams and screams, his cries dissolving into sobs.
The crouched uniform speaks into the radio at his shoulder. “I need an EMT at the intersection of Salts and Vine Street. Let them know we’ve got third-degree burns here. I need an EMT stat.
Somewhere in the distance, sirens wail. The uniform towers over me, guarding me, keeping me in place. I cannot look away from the man writhing on the ground. The weathered skin is now red, actual steam rising from the flesh. The dermis peels away and sizzles like raw meat on a spit.
“What happened? Mam? What happened?” The uniform, towering over me.
“I—he lunged at me. He was going to grab my arm. I warned him. I told him I would throw my coffee at him—”
Then the shock catches up to my brain and cuts off the words. I shake, and the tears overwhelm speech.
The officer puts a hand on my shoulder, to keep me upright, keep me back, or calm me down, I have no idea. He glances at the man and then moves in to block my view.
“A jungle out here, man,” he says under his breath.
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