IN THE CROWDED LUNCHROOM, PLASTIC chairs scrape the floor. The mouths of my classmates open and sandwiches slide in. Jarred eats a peach, the long strings hang from his lips, the deep color of the pit in the blood of the fruit.

I hunger for a peach, a cake, a meat.

I feed myself the future instead: Slender, cheekbones sharp, mouth pursed, thin thighs, thin arms.

I slide the rock into my mouth.

“I WON’T GO OUT INTO THE QUARRY today,” my father says at the breakfast table.

His face is strange and gray. A sour smell fevers off of his body.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asks, exhaling smoke. “Too much again last night?”

A silence comes down on the table. We wait for a fight like this most days. Some days a fight comes, some days it doesn’t. Today, it passes by.

“You’re on your own today,” he says to my brother. “Go to the side lands and look for a new harvest.”

My brother nods. My mother exhales smoke, eyes sharp on my father, dissecting.

“I’m going to see Sophia today,” I say.

“Fine,” she says. “Get out of our hair.”

AFTER BREAKFAST, I SLIP INTO MY father’s office. I slide the gate key from his desk drawer. The metal is hot in my hand, my secret lights a fire in my veins, it thrums in my body, my knot humming.

“Goodbye,” I shout on my way out the door.

I cross the fields, heart racing. All of the sky big and blue as ever, and I am free in the world. The meat is on the air already, the red wounds of the quarry in the distance. Rings of sweat begin beneath my arms.

A latticed black gate rises up before me, the entrance to the quarry. Through the slits in the gate, I can see glimpses of the meat. I slip the key from my pocket and into the mouth of the lock.

The gate swings open with a long, low creak. The path is shallow at the start, with low red rocky walls on either side.

A small set of tracks lines the ground. Metal carts sit silent and empty. I follow the tracks deeper into the quarry. The earth around me gets redder with each step, the scent of meat filling my nose and mouth.

The red rocks gradually morph, the stench growing stronger, almost choking. Slick wet spirals of meat surround me, rising above my head in high walls, thin veins of white fat running through the redness.

The meat glistens like a rare gem, a beautiful hypnosis. Chunks have been removed from the walls here, places where my brother and father tore the meat from the earth to eat and sell.

I run my fingers over the slickness, get red up to the wrists, lick the blood from my fingers.

I move closer, press my body against the meat, press my mouth against the wall, let the blood soak into my face.