He’s built like a brick shithouse made of a hundred smaller brick shithouses.

Mookie the Mook. Mookie the Meat-Man. Mookie the Monster.

Butcher. Bruiser. Breaker of legs. Some legs human. Most not.

Some call him “Mook.” Most don’t call him anything.

Tonight and every night he’s scarred up like the walls of his bar. The walls are carved with names, and Mookie’s carved with the scratches and teeth-marks of subterranean monsters, monsters who wanted to take what he earned: a shipment of the Blue stuff.

They tried. They died.

He rounds the bar, pops the door on a micro-fridge beneath it. Pulls out a paper plate covered in plastic wrap. The oaken bartop’s got the texture of an old cowboy’s face: creases and canyons in the dark wood. He sets the plate down.

This is Mookie’s bar. He is its sole employee. He is its only customer.

It’s also the place he calls home.

Mookie feels old. Every one of his forty-some years on this Earth have come back to haunt him, each bringing another friend – the age is settling into his bones like a cold damp, the years chewing at his joints like rats eating wires.

He reaches up, grabs a bottle of cheap vodka. Most of the liquor behind the bar is firewater. Bad Polish vodkas and off-off-brand tequilas. But there are a few bottles of good stuff, too. Basil Hayden’s bourbon. Bluecoat gin. Macallen 18, a Balvenie Madeira cask, a Laphroaig 18-year. Somewhere in the back, a bottle of Pappy van Winkle. None of that tonight. He won the day, but it feels hollow. No celebration here.

Mookie sits. Spins the cap off the bottle. Pries the plastic wrap off the plate with a delicateness one would not suspect of his thick, callus-upon-callus fingers. But it’s surgical the way he pulls it off, folds it once over, then twice, before revealing the whole of the plate.

Before him, a variety of meats. A soft square of rabbit galantine. An oily circle of salumi. A couple cold blood sausages, each as black as the Devil in the night. Far end of the plate is his favorite: lardo. Chilled, cured fatback.

There exists a moment when he stares down at the array of charcuterie – meats he prepared himself in an act that brings him peace and satisfaction in this violent life – when the pain almost overwhelms him. It’s not the physical pain, though that’s most certainly there, what with the scabbed knuckles and the fat lip and all the other bumps and cuts and pummeled flesh.

This pain runs deeper. His heart a puddle of slushy water that hides an endless well of regret. His heart hurts. It hurts into his stomach and his lungs, makes it hard to breathe, makes it hard to eat. He breathes deep through his nose, then pops the lardo in his mouth–

The hurt fades. The fat melts on his tongue. Salty and sweet. Faintly herby. A true cold comfort, melting over teeth and gums. Eyes closed. Boulder head rolling back on mountain shoulders. He moans. He can’t help it. One of the few things he truly enjoys: the preparation and the consumption. He’s lost to it. He can feel it in his toes.