After a Night in the Meat Market v1

Afterwards, she stood there holding my saran-wrapped face. Weighing it against another face in her other palm as if she had some type of internal system of pulleys and levers that could decipher some all-together hidden value not clearly marked on packaging we come in. She poked the plastic wrapping and my deboned flesh squished together and reinflated slowly clinging to its final protective covering while discharging pent up fluids into a small square odor-absorbing pad in the bottom of my dish. She ran her finger over the plastic and inspected the coloring of my skin. "A little blotchy here and a hair or two I will have to remove before serving her to my guests. She doesn't look like she was a young bitch, this other one is fully grown and had fewer blotches and less hairs, but she is a good 1/8 lb short of meeting my recipe for good face pie." Of course my shopper will have also have to remove cartilage from my nose, unless she is planning something ornamental, and there is the matter of a small once-recurring cyst on the inside of my cheek flesh that will give her guest an unexpected salty-squirt if she doesn't remove it. She throws me into her cart next to potatoes, celery, carrots and we are off to get pie crusts and later from my private bag inside the trunk I can hear the unique ting-a-ling of champagne bottles.

I don't know if you have ever had the experience of being prepared and seasoned before. There was a game my mother used to play with my sister and I as small children. We would be fish and swim around on the carpet in the middle of our bedroom. My mother would sit on the bed looking off into the sky and then all-of-a-sudden swoop down and catch one of us. She would play at deboning us, removing scales, filleting and then my favorite part: salt and peppering us with her fingertips before putting us on the frying pan surface of the bed next to her where we were expected to sizzle-sizzle-sizzle before she lifted us out with a one fisted fork, set us down on her lap plate and gobbled us up ticklishly, then threw our leftovers back into the ocean where we magically became whole fish again and swam around.

Well this is a bit different, because it is for real. And madam is in a hurry. And unlike my mother she doesn't enjoy preparing meat. Starting where the underside of my lip greets my gums she jabs a dull shiv into my mouth and begins prying away the skin from the meat. Skillfully she makes rhythmic back and forth motions just like those used by tenth graders dissecting fetal pigs. Loosen the skin. She has to roll up the sleeves of her fitted white shirt once she gets up to my cheeks and then around to the underside of my ears. She stops there to carefully remove the ears, intact, for later use. She does opt to leave the nose in place as a center piece of the pie. She then lays my fully removed and flattened out face bloody-side up and proceeds to sew my mouth into an inside-out side smile. This is a truly artful touch. She then bludgeons the flesh gently and evenly to make it tender. Then, finally, salt and pepper and some spices too. The rest of my face flesh is blanched and then pulled and stuffed into the crust with potatoes, celery, carrot. My somewhat heavy, but now more pliable and stretched-out skin is laid on top of the filling. She coats the seasoned borders of my visage with a thin layer of egg and then pinches the edges of my face into the lip of the pie pan sealing up the fast. After cooking the final touch is two hard-boiled eggs skillfully wedged into my eye sockets and viola: good face pie!