The Way Out Read Free Page A

never-ending exhalation.
    Outside the sky is already lightening to the colour of a fading bruise, the air hanging cool and still, passive in the path of the coming day. I walk for maybe an hour through deserted streets, silent but for the drum of a thousand beating muscles behind stone walls, on and on, working while their owners sleep. I keep walking, my steps falling into rhythm with them, the world throbbing hypnotically under my feet.
    There’s an angry squeal of rubber on tarmac, followed bythe blast of a car horn and I realise I’m in the middle of the road. I raise my hands in apology to the driver. He’s right up against his windscreen shouting, spit spraying from his mouth onto the glass. I back away, keeping an eye on him just in case he’s thinking about getting out of his car. And that’s when I make the same mistake again, jumping back onto the traffic island just in time. The truck stops right next to me, blocking my path and lets out a furious hiss like a red hot pan dropped into water.
    The truck is huge with slatted sides. It smells of shit and something worse. The driver leans out of his window. ‘Wake up, doll. I nearly had you there!’
    I mutter my apologies and he disappears back inside.
    From the body of the truck comes the scrape of shuffling feet. Through a gap in the side I see movement in the dark and suddenly a snout is pressed to the gap, wet and trembling, desperately snuffling the free air. Asking: are we here? Is this the place? It’s so close I could touch it, this breathing, questioning thing. The truck rumbles and shakes as the driver throws it back into gear. The snout disappears back into the gloom but in its place comes an eye the colour of blood, framed by white eyelashes and creased pink skin. The pig looks right at me. It sees me and it knows. It knows I don’t have the answer either.
    The truck moves away, huffing exhaust fumes into the early morning air.
    I know the slaughterhouse is nearby. Before long that heart will be silenced. The taste of it rises to my mouth like betrayal. I walk in the opposite direction, cross the road and sink down onto the low wall outside a supermarket. Delivery vans trundle into the car park, past a trough of parched geraniums and round to the back doors. The weight in my chest grows heavier and I think of the pig, freed from the truck, skidding unsteadily down the ramp to the holding pens, blinded by the sudden light that lies between.

What Remains
    Standing by the sink in his kitchen, Marvin ran his hand under the cold tap until his finger bones ached like the roots of bad teeth. Was this to be the next thing then? Reduced to making tepid cups of tea to save himself from injury at his own shaking hand. He dabbed it dry with a cloth and examined the damage. There was a red scald the shape of Africa on the back of his left hand and it was beginning to hurt.
    He looked out at the other houses lit in a golden haze from the streetlights. In the small upstairs bedroom of the house opposite, the pacing silhouette of a woman with a baby circled in the muted yellow light, round and round, like a sleepy goldfish. He pushed the window open a crack and listened to the child’s cries rising and falling; a tiny human siren protesting the night.
    Some days Marvin passed the mother in the street, her hair unwashed, narrow shoulders hunched. She looked like the stroller was the only thing holding her up. He’d offered to help her with her groceries once but she’d looked at him as if he’d volunteered to tap dance naked, and hurried into her house. Perhaps she didn’t speak English. Considering how rarely folks around here spoke to each other these days, for all he knew they could each be speaking their own private languages.
    Marvin didn’t sleep a whole lot anymore. The small hours often found him in the kitchen, making tea to take back to bed. He still lay on the left hand side. The right retained