The Butcher’s Boy
by Irene W Collins
[this is the second in a four part series.
read The Town that Forgot It’s Name from the beginning.]
The Butcher’s Boy
The morning the town forgets its names, the butcher’s boy wakes with a revelation: meat never forgets.
It has memory in muscle, story in sinew.
While the mayor hides in his silence and the townspeople drift through the streets like sleepwalkers, the boy sharpens his knife and begins the great renaming.
He starts small – the milkmaid becomes Ribs, the baker becomes Liver, the schoolteacher becomes Tongue. The names stick. Something about the fleshiness of them feels right, honest. People nod when called, even smile.
“Better to be Ribs than nothing,” says the milkmaid.
Word spreads faster than rumor. Soon the whole town visits the shop, not for meat but for identity. The boy stands behind the counter, apron spattered with holy red, granting names like sacraments. He listens carefully to each heartbeat before deciding.
“You sound like Marrow,” he tells an old man. “Deep and hidden.”
By dusk, his chalkboard lists more names than cuts of meat.
The town, once faceless, hums again – each new name salted and sealed, a small defiance against the blankness.
At night, the boy sleeps easily. In dreams, he hears the chorus of his renamed world whisper: We exist, we exist, we exist.
By the next week, the butcher’s boy has turned the town into a market of identities. He paints signs over doorways – Sirloin, Stew, Marrow, Tripe. Even the church bears a new label: The Bonehouse.
His brush moves like a blade – swift, decisive, economical.
Some resist at first. The priest mutters, “We are not livestock.” The boy replies, “Livestock remember their names longer than men.”
Soon even the priest accepts his title: Tongue Prime.
Commerce thrives again. The townsfolk begin to trade not goods, but words. Sirloin sells candles to Brisket, Marrow repairs clocks for Shank. Conversations regain rhythm – short, clipped, pulsing like arteries.
“Morning, Stew.”
“Morning, Chop.”
“The weather’s raw.”
“So’s life.”
Their laughter sounds like cleavers tapping bone.
It becomes a ritual – every transaction a remembrance of self. The market smells of sawdust, smoke, and resurrection.
In his notebook, the boy writes:
Meat equals meaning. Meaning equals mercy.
He doesn’t quite understand it, but it feels true.
At night, he counts his coins and listens to the rhythm of the butcher’s knives in the back room – punctuation in motion, commas between cleavings.
He wonders if this is what language feels like before it’s cooked.
By the seventh nameless dawn, the butcher’s boy declares a feast. A celebration, he says… of identity rediscovered, of flesh redeemed.
They gather in the town square beneath a banner painted in animal blood: WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.
Tables sag with roasted meats and boiling stews. The air hums with smoke, hunger, and something holier as though language itself might be cooked back into them. The boy, knife at his hip like a crown, presides from the fountain’s edge.
He calls each name aloud like a prayer.
“Ribs!”
“Tongue!”
“Marrow!”
Each voice answers, proud, trembling. The echo rings through the square like a hymn of survival.
They eat. They chant. Their laughter turns rhythmic, animal – a chorus of chewing and naming. Children drum the tables with their spoons; old men toast to themselves. For the first time since the forgetting, the town feels whole.
Then, the mayor appears – late, drawn, a shadow among flames. He sits beside the boy, watches the meat steam, lifts a spoon of stew to his lips.
He tastes guilt. It clings to his tongue like a secret.
“This,” he murmurs, “isn’t how we come back.”
The boy looks at him, unblinking. “It’s how we stay.”
Across the square, the townsfolk begin chanting their names faster, louder, as if afraid silence might eat them next.
By nightfall, the fires dim. Bones pile like relics. The boy’s apron glows dark red in the torchlight.
In the final echo before the embers die, someone whispers – softly, almost reverently:
“What were we before this?”
No one answers. The question feels raw, unsalted.
The morning after the banquet, the butcher’s boy wakes to a town emptied of language again.
Signs hang blank. Doors bare. The air tastes like boiled water – thin, directionless.
He runs to the square. Tables overturned, ashes scattered. Plates of meat, untouched or half-eaten, lie nameless in the dirt. He lifts a piece – flesh, still warm, but cannot tell if it’s lamb, pig, or man.
He whispers the names he gave them: Ribs, Liver, Tongue, Marrow.
Nothing answers. The words fall flat, boneless.
He rushes to the shop. His chalkboard gleams clean, as if rain has licked it. In the reflection of the counter glass, he sees his face blur – boy, butcher, namer, nobody.
He carves new names into the table: Bone. Salt. Forgetting. The knife trembles. The cuts look like letters, but mean nothing.
Outside, the mayor’s chair is empty. The bell tower doesn’t ring. Only the faint hum of flies, the small sound of memory decaying.
He sits. Stares at his hands, the same hands that once gave names, once gave order. Now they look strange, unfamiliar, as though borrowed.
He licks his fingers.
Salt.
Blood.
And something else… something like forgetting.
The taste settles in his mouth, heavy and final, as if the town itself has chosen silence again, not as loss this time, but as peace.
In the distance, the horizon whitens – the kind of blankness that erases everything, even guilt.
And in that blankness, he smiles – small, sad, almost holy.
Because at last, no one has a name to lose.
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