The Insides Read Free Page A

rest of the week Guychardson’s at a Caribbean joint somewhere inBrooklyn and Ollie’s on her own here. But even though they spend only two days a week together, they’ve developed a rivalry. They race. They track who’s ahead, who’s made more animals disappear into the walk-in, who’s produced more finished cuts. It’s friendly, sort of. Or, more accurately, it has the surface appearance of being friendly. In reality there’s an edge to it. Guychardson wins almost every night. She thinks he must be cheating.
    The competition has left its mark on her. At the end of one shift last winter, she was going too fast, trying to catch up, and she took off the edge of her left pointer finger, leaving a quarter-inch sliver of flesh on the surface of the prep table. She clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth and closed her eyes, and when she felt the blood begin to well out she clenched her right hand around the wound as if she could unmake her mistake through the application of pressure alone. When the chefs figured out what happened they poured her three shots of whiskey and made her stick the finger into a chafing dish full of kosher salt. She remembers the scream she let out. She doesn’t remember what happened to the tiny filet of finger-meat; it amuses her to think that it might have ended up accidentally swept into a sausage bucket and served to some unsuspecting customer.
    Before that, about a year ago now, just after she’d first started working with Guychardson, she’d asked him how he was able to bone out the hams so effectively. He gave her a grin she immediately thought of as
shit-eating
and said, “I’m a man, baby.” She has tried to make herself believe that he’d said
I’m the man
, but he hadn’t: she knew it then and she knows it now.
    I’m a man
. His stupid answer comes to mind at least once each time they work together, percolating up unbidden through the layers of scorching drone that her SoundDock fills the kitchen with, through the work, which is supposed to ground her, keep her mind from wandering. And each time they work together—every Friday and Saturday—she reaffirms that his answer is bullshit. Being a man has nothing to do with it. He’s tiny. She’s bigger than he is, she’s stronger than he is, and she’s pretty sure there’s no other kind of inherent male advantage that could be helping him in this particular arena. And frankly, his technique isn’t any better than hers either, at least as far as she can tell.
    She takes a quick glance across the table, watches him separate a tough joint. She narrows her eyes, inspecting him.
    Maybe it’s his knife. He uses this weird knife in his kit for almost every task. The weird thing about it is that it has no spine; both sides are sharpened to an edge, like a fucking dagger or something. It’s got no bolster to speak of and the handle looks like he cut it out of a piece of oak with a saw; the whole thing looks like he might have made it in shop class when he was a kid. It makes no sense. She can’t see how anyone could get good action off that thing. But it’s clear that he cares for it. He doesn’t leave it at his station at the end of the day; he takes it with him, in a special lacquered box that only holds the one knife. So maybe there’s something about it.
    Maybe his knife is magic.
    She’s spent a lot of her life around enough people who used magic to cheat the world. She’s done it herself, though that was a long time ago, and she tries not to think aboutit too much, these days. And on an average shift, she stays busy—so it’s pretty easy to keep from thinking too much about anything.
    They work. They wheel filled racks into the walk-in. They drop the hocks and hams and bacon into the big brining buckets. They replenish the prep table with more meat from the basement. Angel and Jon show up. Jon, a curly-haired pirate-looking Caucasian, sticks his head in for only a second, beams a smile at them, then