CHOP CHOP

They arrive in pairs most weeks, blushing like schoolgirls in the kitchen heat.

Their eyes follow you around the room.

Their tongues loll rudely from their mouths.

Their snouts are rough from rooting.

When you hold one and feel the hair and fat and clammy skin of it you wonder how different a person’s head would feel dead in your hands. Sometimes when you pick one up from the peach paper your fingers get stuck in its nostrils, like a bowling ball. Sometimes you can still feel old bogeys up there. A strange feeling, that this head must have been alive once, because only a living thing could produce something as useless as snot.

I’ve heard in fancy places they lather the snouts up and give them a gentleman’s shave with a cutthroat razor. Most kitchens use a blowtorch and burn the hair. It gives off a dark smell, which maybe the fancy places won’t stand for. We throw ours on to the burners and turn them with tongs until their eyes melt. Then we wrap them in a cloth and carry them over to the sink and wash the char off. We do it gently, like an apology. Ramilov, in one of his letters, says that’s what all cooking is: a smart apology for a savage act.

Before the heads are brined and boiled, before they are torn apart at the jaws and the flesh is picked away from the gluey, shaking skin, we cut off the pigs’ ears. A respite, I like to think, from the easy-listening radio and the catcalls of the chefs. With those long rubbery ears gone the heads look naked and sort of comical, like two old men at the end of the pier who lost their toupees when the wind picked up.

I can’t stop looking at how they were killed. I don’t want to look. It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me think I might not be cut out for this after all. A deep, yawning cleaver gash in the middle of each forehead, pushing the animal’s tongue through its teeth with the force.

One chop. Sharp and swift.

One for each of them. Chop chop.

I suppose it’s something I’ll get used to in time.

Now into the pot with you, piggy.