The butcher’s son, Clovis, had crooked fingers. Thick-knuckled and perpetually smeared with grease, they curled around cleavers like they’d been born that way. His left pinky was permanently bent from the time a side of beef slipped off its hook and crushed it. He never got it set right, but the taste of his cold blood aroused him as he mixed pepper into the sausage that he was making for a client—one who only came at midnight, always wearing a glove over his right hand.
The shop smelled of turned meat, the crap one read’s about in trashy magazines my wife, Tilly, devours behind her cataracts. Clovis wiped his palms on his apron—stiff with old smears—and watched the door. The client’s visits always left him gnawing at the insides of his cheeks, the copper tang mixing with the memory of last week’s payment: a single silver tooth wrapped in wax paper.
Outside, rain hissed against the cobblestones like fat in a pan. The butcher’s boy flexed his bad finger absently, feeling the grind of bone where it had healed wrong. He’d dreamed of the glove-handed man again last night—black leather splitting at the seams, something wet and glistening pushing through the cracks. The sausage links trembled when he breathed, as if carrion rising from the dead.
The door’s hinges screamed. Cold air rushed in, carrying the iron bite of the tannery down the street and—beneath it—something Clovis couldn’t name, thick as rendered tallow at the back of his throat. The glove was different tonight: cracked patent leather, fingertips worn through to show crescents of gray flesh and scent of his dear, Tilly.
The client’s sleeve brushed the counter, leaving a damp streak. Clovis swallowed spit gone suddenly sour. “Payment first,” he rasped, knuckles whitening around his cleaver. The silver tooth had left his gums tender for days, throbbing in time with the pulse beneath his ruined finger.
Glove-hand reached into its coat. Not wax paper this time—a stained handkerchief unfurled to reveal a human molar still threaded with shreds of gum. Clovis’ gut clenched. He knew that blackened crown from pressing a kiss to it every morning when Tilly still had teeth to smile with, now to anchor hanging from a hook, to fester.
The cleaver trembled. Not from fear—he’d pressed his lips to worse for silver—but because the glove’s middle finger was splitting vertically, the seam parting with a sound like wet parchment. The thing inside pulsed. Its surface gleamed under the butcher’s lantern, slick and varicose, patterned with veins that didn’t belong to any creature Clovis had ever butchered. Not even the lambs born wrong. Then turning down the light ,,,
