What does the young lady require? he asked, looking at each part of her with his professional’s eye.

The girl was among those who found the butcher repulsive, so she turned to leave, suppressing the rise of a gag.

Perhaps, he called, if nothing here will suit, she would like to see something else—out back?

The girl’s curiosity often led her into troublesome situations, but she considered it part of the pact her soul had made in order to gain entrance to the world, and did not worry much over what befell her. Behind the butcher’s shop was a little dirt yard where a dog was tied, surrounded by many gnawed bones. Sitting on a stump of wood was a large iron skillet.

I made that, he said. Lift it, he said.

But the girl could not lift it, and she wrinkled her face in displeasure. What good is a skillet you can’t lift? she said.

The butcher frowned. He gripped the handle and swung it easily, carelessly. He thought of swinging it against the girl’s head but knew the timing was not right.

The girl walked to where the dog was tied and squatted beside it. What a pair you make, said the butcher. And indeed the picture gave him a great deal of pleasure. It rippled up and down his arms and legs, erecting the many dark hairs to be found there. To get a better look, he strode to where the girl was and gripped her by the back of the neck. He lifted her easily, carelessly.

The girl limped home carrying a packet of liver, but by the time she arrived, her mother was gone. It was just as well, she thought—her mother hated liver.

The girl waited many days, but her mother did not return.

She sat in a dry tub upstairs, eating crackers and thinking. Occasionally she stood to peer from the high, narrow window into the yard below, but the grass and other plants lay drab and useless as ever.

She concluded that her mother must finally have found the man she’d been seeking since the departure of the girl’s father on the eve of her birth. She knew her mother to be a kind woman, but one ultimately dominated by the demands of her sex, which—as she aged—became increasingly totalitarian.

News of the girl’s marriage to the butcher was received without surprise or comment by the people of the town. But after she’d been married a month, the girl—who really was still a girl—saw that what she’d endeavored to understand was not so complex. It wouldn’t do. She rose in the night to roam the woods that edged the town, and there learned many interesting things. The sky was cold and distant and hard, but no matter—she obscured it with her smoke.

Mornings before work, the butcher blackened iron and hammered it into shape on his hobbyist’s anvil. He blackened the girl, too, but she was less malleable than he’d hoped, so he kept her out back with the dog while he sawed bones and clasped hands in his immaculate shop, his white teeth testimony enough for any who might ask.