On Saturdays, my mother and I clean the meat in the big silver sink. On meat cleaning days, watery pink rivers rush off the flesh. The fresh piles of meat rise like bloody castles on the counter.

On Saturdays, we must act very proper because we must take the meat into town. This is a ritual that requires preparation: I clean myself and put on my best dress. I am like the meat in this way.

In the evening, we drive into town, the clean flesh piled in the truck bed.

“Ten gold coins! Twenty gold coins! Thirty gold coins!” bid the men in the town. Their stomachs and guts are large but knotless. They avert their eyes from us or else they stare too long and too hard at our shapes.

I often imagine a man with a body like mine, a man I might marry.

“Do men ever get knots?” I ask.

“Lower your voice. And no. A man has never had a knot. That is a woman’s burden.”

“SOLD!” my father bellows.

The men scoop the clean meat into their own buckets, red and raw, the smell of wet coin in the air.

SOMETIMES, MY FATHER BRINGS UP THE old days.

“My father bought this land for a song. Back then, it was harder to tell which lands would have meat.”

“Nobody thought this land did?” I ask.

“Sure didn’t. Dad knew better though. He could hardly keep the grin off of his face when they were signing the papers. He always told me his gut knew we’d hit it big.”

“How did he find the Meat Quarry?”

“Well, everyone in town thought he was a fool,” my father says. “In the early days, he crawled the land himself, waiting for the feeling in his gut to grow stronger, belly against the soil.”

I move closer to my father. His eyes are not too red yet, the scent of the liquor faint. This is the nicest time to be close.

“It took him two weeks of that. He was on the 13th day when he started to lose faith. But he kept crawling. On the last day, it was raining, and he was out there in the mud, searching.”

“How did he know when he’d found it?”

“He said his gut lit up bright, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Said he’d never felt anything like that before.”

“Like instinct?”

“Like instinct. Your brother has it too, even stronger than I do. But boy, did it save my father’s ass. Everyone in this goddamn town thought he was a joke. Now, we’ve got the best meat on this side of the river.”

LATER, ALONE, I LIE ON MY BELLY IN THE center of my bedroom. My knot presses against the carpet.

I practice my sensing: eyes closed, reaching out with my gut to see where new meat might be on our land.