My hands—my hands are scarred. They have many fleshy imperfections; scars from many years ago, and scars from days ago, and there is a single one—on my right hand—that is from three minutes ago. I was cut by a piece of glass that had been jammed into the ground, whether or not it was placed there on purpose or not, I can’t tell. I stare at the cherry colored liquid drool out quickly. At first, I thought it wouldn’t bleed, but I knew better. I think all of us knew better than to think that it wasn’t going to bleed. It always bleeds, every cut, bruise, and scape bleeds; even the internal ones. The liquid slithered along my scarred hand, and then it did a dip, and fell to the ground. The liquid kept streaming like a river.
            “Why you starin’ at your hands?” Asked Banno. Banno stabbed the sickle into the ground and wiped the sweat from his brow. I looked at him, and saw that sweat had coated his forehead.
            “I got a cut.” I say, and he came close to look at it. He smiled at me. He waved his hand.
            “Oh, what are you a little piglet now?” Ironic that he would say such a thing when we were killing little piglets now. I shook my head furiously.
            “Course’ not. I ain’t no piglet, and you don’t call me one or I’ll have your hand on a necklace.” Banno laughed, and he pulled his Sickle from the ground and placed it on his shoulder.
            “Sure you will,” he laughed. “Sure you will.” He patted a hand on my shoulder. He suddenly gaped at his piglet. It was trying to dig its way under the little wall that enclosed them from running off.
            “Would you look at that Jay, little pink sucker’s tryin’ to run away. Ain’t it cute?” Banno said. I stared at the pig, and listened to its squeals. It was kicking up dirt with its fat little hind legs viciously and was trying desperately to get under the wall, it had about a four tof its head under the wall, but that was it. Banno laughed, and whistled as he threw back his sickle and hacked the little piglet right in two. It squealed again, and he slashed it again. Blood splattered the wall and Banno’s apron and the pig was silenced. Blood drooled from the pieces of the pig, and dirt covered its but which was now literally on two sides. The piglet’s intestines were split as well, and the lunch that had sat in the little creature’s stomach was now a salad of crimson and yellow.
            Banno sighed. “I liked that little pig. He was a fighter, and all fighters deserve to be loved. Too bad though, he was kind of annoying with his squealin’ and kickin’, you dig? He got mud and shit all o’er my apron.” Banno said.
            “You worried about dirt and shit when you got blood all over your apron? And you call me a little piglet.” Banno shook his head again, and he jabbed a finger at me.
            “An apron is for blood, it ain’t for no mud and shit. Now I gotta clean it an extra hour.”
            “You ain’t the one cleanin’ it so it shouldn’t even matter. It’s them scrawny boys who cleanin’ it.” Banno was silenced, like his little piglet, at this.
            “So.” He snapped at me and he opened the entry wall of his station to let in another piglet in to be slaughtered. I stared down at mine who was sniffing the ground, looking for more food. He was a fat sucker and would make a fine dinner once you excavated it’s innards to get out all the fat, so all that was left was the fine meat. He suddenly looked at me with its onyx eyes. We I met eyes for a second, and then I pulled my sickle out of the ground, and it snorted, and began to whimper. I sucked in a deep breath, and rose the sickle.
            “I ain’t sorry.” I said to both Banno and the pig.
The sickle goes down like the Gods’ hammer. The pig’s head rolls off, the body falls, and mud coats its scarlet fur. Blood streams out of the head and onto the mud. When I pull its body out, I find that the little piglet’s head is still staring at me—the sound of the snort-whine resonates in my head, and I swallow as I threw the head into the basket where the excess parts go.
            I let the next little piglet in, and he immediately starts to sniff at the little bowl where I put the food in. I pour a little bit of the sloshy corn from the warm plastic bag. It looks like puke as it fills the bowl, and suddenly a drop of my blood mixes in too. The piglet sniffs it, and he digs in without hesitation. Greedy little piggy; selfish little piggy.
            I stare at it, and I look over at Banno who is slaughtering them like a machine. Too bad they didn’t have machines for this sort of stuff. I think I wouldn’t feel as guilty if I was just pressing a button and not doing the act myself.
            As I kill this piglet, I listen to the sound of all the other boys, hacking and slashing at their little piglets, letting in more of them, the smack of the wooden wall on the small slab of concrete between the killing pen and the waiting pen. I heard their ragged breaths, their breaths of not caring. Maybe if I listened close enough to them, I could hear their thoughts. Maybe some of them were listening to the radio in their head, maybe some of them were thinking about what the piglets actually tasted like—raw. Not that we every got to eat the piglets, in fact, the piglets probably ate each other more than we ever would eat them. We got the very few rations and spoiled vegetables, the rest of it went off in an airy truck—causing the spoiled food to spoil and an accelerated rate—to the Prison.
            I think that was the Governor’s way of slaughtering us—humans. I think that he killed us in the least susceptible ways possible—drug overdose, food poising, and the outbreak of a malicious virus only Prisoners could catch. I think that they had a way of thinning the population, and making room for more Prisoners. The Governor was always one to save money.      Blood coated my apron once more, and I noticed that there was mud and shit on my apron as well. It was an elaborate painting of scarlet and brown, and pictures seemed to pencil themselves onto the apron, the blood streaming around the mountains of mud in long uncoordinated cracks. A piglet squealed and I looked up at the little pink blob as he scarfed down the yellow slop that they called food. I stared at it for a second, it didn’t see me. It only saw the yellow slop.
            “Tasty ain’t it?” I asked it, it didn’t answer me, only dug its face in deeper. I swung the sickle like a club—ching-crunch—the pigs head launched itself into Banno’s station. Banno staggered back, affrighted. After realizing what it was, he began to laugh, looking at me all the while.
            “You got me good there, Jay.” He picked the pig head up and looked at its eyes. Yellow slops still stained its wrinkled pink lips. A long wire of saliva coursed out of it, and snapped off to meet the ground. Banno shook his head. “Sick shit.” Shaking his head, he threw the pig head in the canister. Enter next pig, a script would have said.
             He swung his sickle like a maniac and the blood seeped into the brown earth under the pig’s feet. Banno put the pig body into the bucket with the others, and I watched as the flies dispersed from the other bodies, and then returned to feast. They buzzed, and covered the bodies of the pigs. The piglet’s arms hung limp, and were thrown over each other like they were trying to give each other hugs from beyond the dead.
            I let another piglet in, and this one was shivering, it was thin too. I stared at it, stabbing my sickle into the ground. Its head jerked up to look at me with frightened red eyes. It couldn’t be no more than a few months old—not unlike any of the others—but still younger than the others.
            “Eh—Ey, Banno, look at this one.” I said and nudged Banno just as he was about to joint the pink turd before him—sickle in slashing position above his head, feet spread slightly waist width apart, knees slightly bent. He looked at me, glowering, and gazed at the shuttering scarlet mass before me. He fell out of position and took a step towards my pen.
            “Whatthehell?” Banno said in one word, and he suddenly dropped to his knees. The little pig flung itself against the wall and squealed, or screamed rather. It stared at us, and trembled even more. Banno looked up at me, and we both pulled down our masks from our lips.
            Instantaneously, before either of us could get a word out, the putrid smell of the Slaughterhouse hit our noses with such force, you would have thought you were drowning in air. It was a mixture of rusted iron, mud, and spoilt crotches. It was sour and aged, and it was almost like jamming your face right in the ass of one of the piglet’s mommas. After sharing a brief shutter, our nose became accustomed to the smell and Banno spoke.
            “Should we go tell Ajax?” I looked at the piglet again, and then shook my head.
            “Nah, we just gonna have to hack it up into pieces and take em’ to Madame Miseray.” Banno’s lips tightened at the suggestion.
            “Alright,” he said after a moment of consideration. “Kill it first, and then put it in with the parts for now, don’t fo’get it’s in there now.” Banno said. The little piglet seemed to understand and it screamed, and screamed loud. Both Banno and I slapped on our masks again. Quickly, I ripped the sickle out of the ground with a geyser of dirt racing after it. It screamed and started to sprint around in the pen. I jumped over the little fence and into the pen, and then chased it down into a corner, and finally—with one triumphant scream—the piglet’s head was off. Blood stained the little corner behind it, and it covered the blade of the sickle and my hands with equal amounts. A droplet, like rain, slid from the curved blade of the sickle and I swallowed hard, and I collected the piglet’s remains. I tossed them into the excess canister.
            I stepped back over the fence, and checked my hand for the cut—it was indiscernible behind the curtain of crimson that covered my hand, and I found that I was shaking—bad. I closed my palm into a fist, closing my eyes and fighting back what I could only say were tears. I opened the wall again, still trembling.
            Another, plump fatass came into the pen and started to scarf down on the yellow waste. Its head was off in the next moment.

The fluorescent lights beamed on, and the paroxysmal scream of the bell pounded my ear drums. There was the unified sound of the wall locks clicking, and the squeal and scream of pigs throughout the farm. The yellow fluorescents buzzed as we all began to chatter. This was the end of the shift, the end of another long, gory day of laborious slaughtering.
            Banno and I there our aprons onto the hooks, took off the dirty white coats we were forced to wear, and threw them on the hooks as well. Our sickles were to be placed in the buckets full of chlorine at the doors of the Slaughterhouse. Banno and I dropped ours in and they went in with a plunk, sinking to the bottom with the rest of them. The chlorine had the same intense smell, but it was now mixed with the gritty smell of pig’s blood. The liquid had been turned into a dark, onyx color.
            Outside, it was freezing, and snow fell from the sky which was turning obsidian, the bright floodlights lit the path ahead of us, but the light only reached out so far before all wad dark. The trees shuttered in the slow wind, and the mountains far beyond The Fence were only shadows against the sky.
            Even from here, I could see the barbwire topped fence, and snow gathering on its spikes. The fence was nearly one hundred feet tall, and it wasn’t just chain-link that kept us in, but electricity that ran through it. There were tails about strange monsters guarding the Fence as well, slumbering and waiting for its next victim. The last time someone tried to escape, they say they were brought back by two soldiers, only they carried a torso, dripping with blood, the rest of the body had been lost. The torso, so it is said, was mangled, bitten, and the head was barely still on the neck. No one knows what happened to the man, and no one knew his name. It was that very story that kept people from the Fence, which kept them from escaping. Of course, this didn’t stop our dreams of the outside, the Cities and the Forest. You can never stop dreams and aspirations.
            Banno and I walked along the black dirt rod like everyone else, our boots crunching in the snow as we walked, a monotone soundtrack that changed only slightly with every step.
            “We’ll come back tonight and get the pig.” I said to Banno under my breath, smoke rising from my mouth like some from The Farmer’s pipe.
            Banno shook his head, and looked at me in the semi-darkness, the floodlights till providing what little light they could to us. “No good, we’re going to have to hide and wait for Ajax to get ready to close the doors, when they lock up the Slaughterhouse, all the pig bodies are taken, with their parts. The parts get taken to the Incinerator down by the creek, the bodies go intot he Tunnels.”
            The Tunnels was an elaborate labyrinth made up of streets, it was also a pre-processing plant were the piglet bodies were diced apart, cleansed, and thrown onto a truck to head to the Factory. In other words, it was a sweat shop. Everyone knew about it because every night, at 11:59, a whistle would sound, and a tremor would file through the earth, and we knew that their shift was over. Sometimes, you could see steam rising from the earth near the Farmer’s Mansion.
            I shudder at this, and then nod. “Alright, wait till we get further in the path.” I said and Banno nodded. We walked with our arms wrapped around our bar skin.
            We walked down the snow topped hill, and then we broke from the others once it was dark enough, and we hit behind a large rock. We watched as our brethren walked, shivering, no one talking anymore. They marched like little toy soldiers, and their breaths rose into the air, an endless furnace of smoke. Some of them could barely raise their feet as they walked, they shuffled instead. The cold bit into their skin like a wolf into the flesh of a rabbit. Banno and I sat shivering and watching, feeling only pity for ourselves and our brothers.
            When they were a good twenty yards from us, we started up the hill again, snow crunching, and snow falling on our heads. Before long, we could see the scintillating floodlights beaming on the white snow in front of the Slaughterhouse.
            Ajax was sitting on a crate in front of it, smoking a cigarette. Ajax was scarping six-eleven, and had muscles the size of our thighs, and his neck was like a roll of beef from a cow. He was dark skinned, and blind in one eye, but his other eye was so good that he could see what seemed like a mile away.
            He suddenly looked up at us and blew out a large cloud. He smiled, several of his teeth missing, despite him only being nineteen. “Well if it ain’t my two buddies, Banno and Jay-ho.” Ajax said with a curt laugh that rolled into a cough. After we stood for a second, in the yellow floodlight, Ajax threw his cigarette down and snuffed it out with the tip of his boot. He looked at us with his one good eye.
            “What you two need?” Banno and I looked at each other, and explained the incident with the Skinny Pig. Ajax’s face slowly twisted into surprise, and then he was on his feet, towering over us like the trees themselves.
            “Come on then, we better get it before the Collectors get to ‘em.” Ajax said and he slid open the Slaughterhouse door, the 9 painted poorly on its face fading into the shadows. Once inside, we were once again greeted by the stench of the house.
            “You never get tired a’ dat smell.” Ajax said to us, his voice echoing throughout the Slaughterhouse in a fading ‘ell…ell…ll…ll’,
            Banno and I led him to our station, and sure enough Skinny was still in the canister with all the other parts. Ajax reached in and grabbed the body by its hind legs and it hung limp still, its ribs more prominent, the blood that had dripped so fluidly a few hours ago, was now turned black against its fur. Ajax let out a whistle, and several of the pigs snorted behind the kennel walls.
            “You wasn’t lying about skinny, ain’t wort’ a dime dis here piggy.” He said. I dug for the pigs head, feeling the other parts move around like worms on my arm. The fur and the intestines, the moisture of the dried blood and the head that still coursed from their bodies. I checked the tags on the pig head ears and realized I hadn’t been paying attention to the damned tag. I don’t think anyone did, all we cared about was hacking their heads off and dumping them into the canisters, what was the use trying to remember their names and faces? Then I felt one head that was more skin than fat. I dug it out, and sure it enough it was Skinny’s. Ajax gripped Skinny’s head and sighed.
            “Po thing probably din’t get ‘nuff food.” Ajax satred into Skinny’s forever distressed eyes.
            “Maybe it was just born dat way.” Banno said with his arms crossed. Ajax shok his head, never taking his eyes off of Skinny.
            “Ain’t no pig just born not to be fat, dat’s what a pig is. Fat, a big lump a’ pork and lard. Notin’ more.” To this, the pigs in their kennels squealed out and scratched the walls. Ajax sighed and looked around the rest of the Slaughterhouse. The other dead pig bodies were piled on top of each other, some had fallen to the floor, and flies had amassed themselves around their pink bodies.
            “Come on boys, let’s go bag dis one, dem Collectors freak me out.” He said and we started for the doors. I couldn’t deny, the Collectors were pretty creepy.
            They wore pristine white suits, and they had big tanks full of a strange liquid that stiffened the piglet bodies, and stiffened the blood so it wouldn’t drip when the Tunnelers cut into the flesh. They also wheeled around large garbage carriers that they threw the pig bodies in like they were noting but loafs of bread. There was also their helmets. They were shrunken to fit the details of the wearers had, and their eyes were covered by black lenses. They looked like skeletons with soulless eyes, eyes that were like New Moons.
            I shudder at the thought of them.
Ajax led us down a side road, shutting the tin door behind us. The road went down the same hill, but we turned when we hit the frozen creek about half a mile away from the cabins. The hill was a wall of frozen stone fingers and rough snow. At the bottom there was flatland that led out into the Backyard. The Backyard was a large, rocky field of boulders tall as trees and junk that was trapped under years of snow. At the very edge of the Backyard, there were two things. One of those things was the Fence, always electrified and omnipresent. Then there was the small line of steel cabins that belonged to the Miseray family. They had been trapped behind the Fence a hundred years ago, and they had been given a deal by the first Farmer to guard the fence if they were given all the necessities of life, the things we Slaughterers did not have: good food, good wheat, good water, and good living. Good living meant sown quilts and actual hearths; it meant power at night, and it meant actually being able to sleep without the sound of the backdoor banging again and again, all night long.
            They were also the friends of the Slaughterers. They didn’t like what the Governor was doing to us all, and so they had sworn that they were in eternal favor of the Slaughterers and the Workers, it was passed down from generation to generation. They were one of the reasons we had hope, one of the reasons we still knew there was good in the world.
            We trudged through the snow, the wind whistled around us, and my skin had gone numb. My ears were probably red as my own blood in water, and I knew that I was becoming as ashy white as the snow around us. You never truly got used to the cold, even though it was all we had known most of our lives. Few of us had come from the Reign. The Reign was an enormous, glittering circle city that was four hundred miles in diameter all the way around. It had a wall that was supposedly five hundred feet tall and made of iron from the earth under their feet. It was supposed to be the only Free City left in the world, or at least the world we knew. It was supposed to be the only place where the sun shined more than it was covered, and the only place where you were free to choose your life. It was the only place where the Governor could not reach, and they had been formally called The Reign because of their long reign since the Fall.
            We reached the iron cabins a few minutes later, our shoulders covered in snow, snow stuck in our hair, and our thin shirts flapping in the wind. Ajax rose his big arm and knocked hard on the frosted metal. A few seconds later, the lamplight that hung on a rusted chain above us burned to life, the light bulb in it was covered in dead moths that we got in the spring time. The door opened with a horrid grating sound, and an old woman with her hair bundled at the top opf her head appeared. Her face was like a tree, wrinkles creased it every which way, and her eyes were like the storms that came in the autumn. She smiled at us, and moved aside with her cloak of blankets sliding around her.
            “Come in, come it. It is cold out.” She said in a low voice like shattering glass. We entered the warm home. It was dim in the room, the only light was provided by the blazing hearth at the front of the room where four young boys slept. Two older boys were stretched out on the couches, they were twins, and an old man was sleeping in the large chair. Two little girls were on the right side of the fireplace, and a baby and a dog were wrapped up on the left side of it. I had seen my brethren in one room, but this is what you call family. The old woman led us to the small kitchen there a girl with tumultuous read hair and frayed clothing was rubbing another dogs belly with her foot. She was reading a large packet of crumpled paper, scrawled onto it were hundreds upon hundreds of words.
            “Yuga,” the old woman said. The red head looked up, and her cerulean eyes glittered in the dimness.
            “Maddi Miseray, e serè naphe?” She bowed and dopped from the counter. The dog got back to its feet and bounded over to sniff our feet. Then he began to lick Banno’s hands. Banno smiled and petted the dog’s head.
            The old woman, Madame Miseray, spoke in the girls tongue. “Teisare ne fel.” The red head nodded and opened one of the cabinets to reveal a small box with a faded green leaf on it. Green tea.
            “Come,” the woman said and guided us again. The floorboards creaked under our weight, and she then swung open a trap door leading us down into darkness. Ajax led behind her first. Banno closed the door behind him with the dog still looking at us for a brief moment before all was dark.
            Pstch.
A glowing light broke through the darkness, and Madame Miseray was holding a match in her skeleton like fingers, spires in the darkness brightened by the sun. “What brings you all here tonight? Why so late?” My heart leapt, and Ajax looked back us, obviously seeing our fear.
            “How late is it, Madame?” Ajax asked. She chuckled lightly.
            “Not very, but late enough where our business must be short. Now,” she said as she reached the foot of the stairs, and began climbing up another flight of them. “What is your business?” At the foot of the first step, it was deathly cold, and I knew we were far under the surface of the frozen junkyard above.
            “Da boys here went and found them a Skinny Piggy.” Madame gulped, and it echoed. She stopped and looked back at us.
            “A Skinny Pig? How could this be so? I thought that—” Ajax shook his head, and Madame’s stormy eyes darkened before she turned and walked a step faster. Banno and I met eyes, and not for the first time, I wished we had telepathy. But his eyes said enough.
            Secrets.

In the next cabin, Madame had laid he pig out on a quilt upon the bed. The windows let in livid light, and the wind was still whistling its dark tune. Madame stared at its thin body, she examined where its head had come of, and she slid a finger across its pink fur and skinny rib bones.
            “I’ll get rid of it,” she said slowly, not taking her eyes off of the pig. “but, I need you to look out for more of these. Call me an old superstitious bat, be that as it may, but this may be a sign that the Farmer if dying.” She said, and there was a hint of a smile. “Maybe it means that the Governor is dying as well.” She said.
            “Why the Governor?” Banno asked. Madame laughed.
            “Have you ever seen the Governor? Or any politician for that matter?” We all shook our heads, even Ajax. She smiled at us in the cold light. “All of them are fat hogs who eat their hearts out because they can. They watch all of us starve while chomping down on a chicken leg. They have debates over dinner, and they sit slumped in those big leather chairs at the top of their towers. They complain about the Reign, and how they’re not winning the war in the South, yet they’re not doing anything about it.” She put one finger up. “But, every pig or hog must die or be killed. The Skinny Pig just means that it might be coming, they might be running out of the thing they cherish the most.” She laughed, and we all gave a smile.
            The trap door at the front of the room opened, and there came the redhead with a plate of cups. Steam curled up from the cups and I felt my tongue ride over my lips.
            “Thank you, Amelle.” The girl bowed again, and she nodded to us, hurrying out. She was so graceful, and she closed the door quietly. We sipped tea around the pig, and I stared out the window out at the cold. A bleeding fog was beginning to roll through the night, and the quarter of a moon was casting ghostly light onto the scene. Haunting, but not so that I felt gooseflesh climb up my arms. The tea was too warm for that.
            “Madame,” I said after a minute. She looked up from the pig.
            “Hm?” She said while sipping her tea.
            I chose my words carefully. “Were you there when the world became this way? When the Farmer, the new one, got here? What have your eyes seen?” She finished her tea, and poured in more from the pitcher. She didn’t answer, and when she looked at me again she frowned.
            “A long story for another time. But, no, I was not here when the world became this way, I would be dead if I was. But I was where when the Governor came into power, and he continued the slaughter for another three years. I saw my own mothers brains splayed across the wall of an alley, and I ran away before I could join her. And yes, I was here when the Farmer was renamed. He took my daughter after she had her last child a few weeks ago.” The baby and the dog flashed in my mind. “And my eyes have seen many things, again, a long story for another time.” She sipped her tea and looked out the window. “No more time for now. It is best that you all go before the Sirens start to call the dogs and the Fly’s.” We nodded, and finished up our tea, and started for the trapdoor.
            We said our goodbyes, one of the twins mumbled in his sleep as we left, something about pigs, which unnerved me. Could Madame have been right? Could this age be coming to a close? Could the Governor and his fat army be thinning up? This and the warm Green Tea in my stomach filled me as we began to tread across the barren field of snow and mist. The moon hung above us, the midnight medallion in a sea of lights. Ajax walked us about three fourths of the way to our cabins, said his goodbyes and good lucks, and sprinted up the way towards his own cabin. All the leaders of their Slaughterhouses had a cabin around the Farmers Mansion, but in no way were they nearly as luxurious.
            Banno and I crunched down the dirt and snow path towards the cabins. The trees were taller around the cabins, and it wasn’t for protection, rather I think it was for the pure fear factor of them. They were the dark stalkers that reached up to the sky, looked down upon us like vultures picking their next meal. Before long we were passing the tall frosted pole that had the Sirens on top of them. There was also an ancient, cracked digital clock. Our hearts settled at the sight of 9:47pm. At 9:50pm there was the warning siren then, there was then there was the ten o’clock Hunt for those who were out later.
            Right outside of our cabin camp, there were two boys sitting on a rock. One of them was a bulky blonde, the other was a thin apprentice looking boy with ratty orange hair and cold green eyes. The blonde could have been a Lumberjack, but I knew he was higher ranking Slaughterer. Supposedly, the higher ranking Slaughterers got to wrestle their prey and kill them in a fight, which would explain their bulkiness. But, in all honesty, was fine where I was. The skinny boy must have actually been an apprentice, otherwise he wouldn’t be out in the freezing cold this late.
            Our cabin was number 77. It was a leaning box that stood on three frosted stilts, and the fourth was broken, and so the whole thing slumped in the front. The only thing that was probably keeping it together was the snow and ice that wedged itself between the cracks and the wood. I imagined that if summer ever came—a summer with sun, flowers, and actual heat—the whole monstrosity would collapse in on itself. Inside, the others were already asleep, and the cabin smelt of snow, sweat, and blood. There were no beds, just blankets, thin pillows stuffed with human hair, and piles of dirty clothes mountain-ed across the room, specifically at the slumped corner of the room where the third leg of the cabin had broken.
            Banno and I picked our way through the mass of bodies (usually one cabin could fit thirty some boys in if they didn’t take up to much floor space, which we didn’t) and found our spot near the back of the room, facing the labyrinth of trees. We grabbed a blanket from one of the piles of clothes, got on our backs, and huddled up close to each other. It got cold at night, and only body heat could truly keep you warm. Even the workers underground had better conditions than we did. But it wasn’t like they ever got to enjoy them, they worked almost literally day and night without stop.
            The backdoor, as I have told you, banged near us. The wind swiveled through the opening the door created every few seconds, and this was a constant frost, a constant agitation that kept me awake. This was my soundtrack most of the night, beyond the sirens which screamed out for about thirty minutes. Then there was the scrambling bark and clawing of dogs against the trees, snow, and gates. It was torture to my mind, it was like being a hall of shattering glass, there was no escape. But after the chaos of the sirens and the dogs, the door was always there. Breathing in cold night air, and the moon beams down on us, a deathly pale stare.
            But, despite all these rackets, I find sleep.