“Entrails”

by Gabriel Tronson

Dan thinks the cows are haunting him. Specifically, the cows whose intestines he pulls out at the slaughterhouse. He’s sitting by the window in his apartment thinking of the bubbling sound cows make when their throat gets cut and the red waterfall pours out. He’s come to realize fresh blood doesn’t smell. It’s the dried blood that makes him queasy.

 “You know where the remote is?” Arin, his roommate, asks from the couch.

 “What?” Dan gets pulled from his thoughts.

 “The remote. I can’t find it.” Arin is stuffing his hands inside the couch, much like how Dan stuffs his hands inside the bodies of half-conscious, upside-down cows.

 “Oh, I don’t know.” Dan gets up from the chair and joins his roommate, happy for a distraction. They pull out the couch cushions only to find a few loose quarters.

“You need those for your little collection?” Arin asks with a smirk.

“A 2019 Virginia quarter?” Dan asks in disgust.

“I guess not.” Arin starts replacing the cushions, but Dan reaches in and snatches up the change.

 “Struggling to pay your half of the rent?” Arin asks as he scans the living room.

 “Yup.” Dan glances down the hallway that leads to their bedrooms. For a second, he thinks a cow is standing in the dark, looking at him. It sends a jolt through his body.

 “I’m not,” Arin says, pulling open drawers and searching behind the TV.

“Good for you.”

“It is good for me.”

“How much do you make being your foreman’s bitch, again?”

“Enough to pay the rent.”

“At least I get to sleep in.”

“At least I don’t get sprayed by blood at my job.” There’s a sticky sort of emotion clinging to these words; something like jealousy. Dan pretends not to hear it.

“Unless someone falls from the scaffolding.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Do your burley construction buddies know you’re a painter?” Dan asks, moving past his roommate’s easel and into the kitchen.

“Hell no,” Arin says, “were you watching TV in the kitchen? Why would the remote be in there?”

 “Sometimes I listen to the news while I eat breakfast,” Dan lies, not wanting Arin to know he thinks ghost cows might’ve moved their remote as revenge. Arin shrugs, slaps his hands against his thighs as a sign of surrender to the lost remote, then grabs his painting pallet from a cupboard and runs sink water over it. The drain drinks the colorful water.

“Don’t forget the plastic this time,” Dan says, looking at the red speck imbued in their carpet. Arin grumbles and goes to his bedroom. Then, from somewhere in the building, Dan hears a moo. He whirls around, stares at the ceiling, then speeds to their door and yanks it open. He peers into the hallway expecting a vengeful cow.

“Do you watch TV out in the hallway as well?” Arin asks, returning and placing sheets of plastic around his easel.

 “Just thought I heard a noise,” Dan says as he spots something; there’s a quarter laying on the stained carpet in front of their door. He picks it up and steps back inside. The coin looks vintage, like the ones he collects.

 “We always hear noises,” Arin says, squirting paint onto his pallet. A child screeches, a pair of heavy footsteps thud past their door, and someone is yelling on the floor above them.

 “A real bouquet of sounds,” Dan says, glancing at the painting.

“It’s still under construction,” Arin says. It’s a nightmarish picture, mostly black, with a humanoid figure lying in the center. Red things are sprouting from his stomach, and the man’s mouth and eyes are enormous as he screams in pain.

“Construction?” Dan asks past the sour taste in his throat.

“Creation is construction. Or maybe I’m just trying to fool myself.” Arin shrugs and stabs at the painting with his brush. Dan retreats to his bedroom after a moment. He’s only been able to bring up his discomfort about Arin’s fascination with gore once. It’d been on a day he’d gotten back from work and heard Arin in his room watching real gore videos, something that happens at least once a week. The conversation had happened in the living room a few weeks ago.

 “Why do you watch those?” Dan asks, muting the TV and silencing Family Feud as Arin comes out of his bedroom. There’d been screams coming from behind his door a moment earlier.

Arin looks around like Dan is speaking to someone else.

“The gore videos.” Dan forces this sentence from his throat like a shard of glass.

“Ah,” Arin says, nodding and taking a seat on the couch, “I didn’t know you knew.”

“You play them loud.”

“Gotta hear every detail.”

“There’s this spiffy new invention called headphones.”

“Those can damage your ears.”

Dan is silent. He watches Steve Harvey move his mouth without speaking.

“It’s research.” Arin is casting a sidelong glance at his roommate.

“About?”

“Us.”

“If you’re planning on killing me, now is the wrong time to tell me.”

“No, man.” Arin shakes his head and his short hair is tousled around, “human beings.”

“Okay.”

“Seeing their inner-workings, you know?”

“Okay.”

“Have you tried watching? It’s interesting.” Arin pulls out his phone. On the screen is a paused video of a man laying in a hole in the ground, like a dirt bathtub, with the barrel of a shotgun pointed at his head. Arin plays the video and the man’s head is blown open like a watermelon. Dan quickly jerks his gaze away.

“That shit messes with you.”

“It’s interesting,” Arin repeats.

“There are some things you can’t unsee. Watching that kinda stuff hurts my soul.”

Arin seems very intrigued by this. He keeps trying to form a sentence, but it never comes out. Dan stays silent, watching quiet commercials flashing different products into his retinas. Arin eventually gets up and goes back into his room. Dan unmutes the TV and turns it up ten more notches to drown out the sounds of the screams. He’s kept it cranked ever since, just in case. And he’s never forgotten the video of the man getting his head blown open.

In his bedroom, Dan thinks about the same thing he always thinks about when his thoughts travel to his roomates gore fascination: the fact that the screams, though horrendous, are not as hard to listen to as the screams of the cows. Dan has thought hard about why this is, usually when he’s in the shower at night, washing away the smell of innards from his skin and rubbing the red stains off his wrists. He thinks it’s because cows are innocent. Their lives are simple and humble. They bumble around, eat grass, have fun, and then get introduced to the worst pain they’ve ever experienced, and they don’t understand why or what they did wrong.

Dan closes the door of his bedroom before lowering himself to check underneath his bed for baby cows. Satisfied, Dan gets to his feet and heads to the bedside table to add the vintage quarter he’d found in the hallway. He opens the drawer and feels ice travel from his throat to his stomach. The collection of quarters is ransacked, and a handful of them are missing. Dan looks at the quarter he found in the hallway and realizes it looks vintage because it’s one of his. He puts it where it belongs and closes the drawer, then scans the room. It doesn’t look like anything else was touched, but the window leading to the fire escape is open.

“Arin, someone was in my room,” Dan says, heading to the living room. Arin is gone. The painting stares at him from the easel. Someone laughs somewhere in the apartment complex; it’s a long, raspy laugh, like wisps of smoke.

“Arin?” Dan steps into the hallway as a few drunk teenagers shamble past. Dan looks after them and spies another gleaming quarter. He goes over and picks it up, then spies another piece of his collection even further. Dan follows the trail to the stairway door and pushes it open. His footsteps bounce around the concrete walls. Dan pauses, rubbing his hands together, but he knows cows can’t pick up quarters with their hooves, so he has peace of mind on that.

Dan follows the stairs to the roof, where he shoves open the door despite the sticky handle. There’s a figure standing by the ledge with thinning hair that’s an unusual mix of gray and brown. His arms and legs are boney and pale. Dan recognizes him as the neighbor who always seems to have loud sex. He thinks his name is Lex.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on?” Dan asks, picking up the last quarter.

“We need to talk,” Lex says.

“Then talk.” Dan wonders if Arin got mixed up with drugs.

“You listen to your TV too loud,” Lex says, holding up his right hand. He has their remote. Dan blinks.

“Oh, sorry,” Dan says after some silence.

“And I have hobbies, understand?” Lex asks, still facing away from him.

“You’re hobbies get loud,” Dan murmurs. Lex spins around and tosses the remote at him. Dan is unable to react in time, and the device hits his chest and lands on the floor. The back of the remote pops off, and the batteries make their escape.

“My hobbies are naturally loud! Do you know anything about sex? Women can’t help themselves when I’m inside them,” Lex says, waving his hands dramatically. His nose is like a skyscraper with nostrils roughly the size of manholes. Small hairs peer out from the depths.

“My TV volume interferes with your sex life?”

“How am I supposed to keep a hard-on when all I hear is Steve Harvey talking about his goddamn survey?” Lex’s eyes are red and sunk deep inside his head. They bore into Dan.

“Tune it out.” Dan can’t make himself hold Lex’s gaze for long so he decides to stare into the darkness of his nostrils. He thinks he sees something moving around inside.

“I can’t. All I can see in my mind’s eye is his goddamn mustache every time I hear him talk. That voluptuous mustache.”

“You’re crazy,” Dan informs him.

“About women, yes.”

“I need my TV loud.”

“Why?” Lex demands, shambling from side to side.

Dan shifts his weight from one foot to the other and tries to think up a reasonable excuse.

“Look, I am asking nicely.”

“You broke into my apartment you psycho.”

“The window was unlocked.”

“That’s not the point!” Dan shouts and starts vaguely scanning the area for the missing batteries to occupy his eyeballs with something other than gazing into Lex’s monstrous nostrils. The door behind them opens, and Arin appears with a pack of cigarettes.

 “I thought you might’ve gone for a smoke,” Arin says, then falters as he sees Lex.

“He broke into our apartment.” Dan points at the gangly man.

“What?”

“Your TV is too loud!” Lex interrupts, “so I decided to send a message. That’s all.”

“Everyone around here is too loud,” Arin counters, popping a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it. Dan finds one battery, but can’t locate the other no matter how hard he wills it into existence. Ghost cows, he thinks.

“Most other noise is at an acceptable volume.”

“Acceptable for what?”

“Sex.”

Arin frowns.

“Don’t ask,” Dan whispers to him.

“Now that I think about it, sometimes when your TV is off, I hear odd things from your apartment,” Lex says, his expression changing. Dan glances at Arin.

“Just internet videos,” Arin says, pulling the cigarette from his mouth like a tooth and dropping it into the garbage, not even half-smoked. He tosses in the pack as well and rubs his eyes. “Did you seriously break in?”

“The window was unlocked.”

“That’s not the point.”          

“Yeah. I told him that as well,” Dan says, giving up on the last battery and looking at the jungle gym of concrete and electricity sprawled out around him.

“What kind of internet videos?” Lex is squinting at Arin, nostrils pointed like cannons in his direction.

“Hardcore pornography.”

“My man.” Lex nods in appreciation. Arin rolls his eyes.

“We can keep the TV quieter,” Dan says because the night air is massaging the warmth from his skin. He dreads having to listen to the gruesome noises, but doesn’t see another option.

“Well, good. Thank you,” Lex says, then gets on the ledge of the building and steps off. Dan is frozen. He stares at the edge, thinking Lex should still be there.

“Whoa!” Arin screams, knocking over the garbage can as he sprints to the ledge. Dan stumbles after him, head spinning. They both peer over and see Lex making his way down the fire escape. He clambers through his apartment window.

“Jesus Christ,” Dan says. The pair glance at one another, laugh out of relief, and then fall into squirming silence.

“What a night,” Arin says eventually, retrieving his cigarette pack from the overturned garbage.

“Inspiration for a new painting?” Dan asks as the pair start down the stairs, passing a teenage couple on their way to the roof. The man has a condom in his hands.

“I’m getting tired of painting humanity. Maybe I should paint nature,” Arin says as they exit the stairway and get back to their apartment.

“What about your research?” Dan finds a new battery, loads it into the remote like a shotgun shell, and turns the TV down to a mild volume. Steve Harvey is yelling about the survey. The more Dan thinks about the word survey, the less real it seems.

“I don’t like what I’m learning.” Arin is standing in front of his painting with his arms crossed.

“What are you learning?”

“That the miracle of life is taken for granted.”

Dan watches the gameshow. It numbs his thoughts.

“I left the apartment to get some fresh air,” Arin comments, “then I went to look for you.”

“Fresh air?” Dan asks like it’s a foreign concept.

“I saw a mass shooting on Live Leak. It effected me as much as all the other videos I watch. Then I looked up a list of mass shootings this year.” Arin is stroking the edge of the painting.

“Big numbers?”

“There’s been a mass shooting every week in America through the entire year.”

“Goddamn.”

“Life is just-” Arin sounds like he’s struggling, “it’s so beautiful and sometimes I feel like I’m the only fucking person on this godforsaken rock that can see that.”

Dan grunts. He feels like crying. In his mind’s eye, the man gets his head blown open. The dirt bathtub he was lying in fills with red water.

 “We both thought Lex jumped off the building because we’ve come to expect death.” Arin starts putting away his painting supplies in a mechanical way, scrubbing each piece clean like they were the parts of a rifle.

“Life isn’t valued,” Dan mutters, sitting on the couch and looking past the TV. He smells the dried blood of the slaughterhouse. He sees the cows getting their throats by the workers who converse casually with one another like they were at an office by the water cooler. He listens to the scraping sound as they sharpen their knives for the sixth time that day to continue cutting white skin with blotches of black soaked into it like huge droplets of ink on paper. He sees faintly struggling cow get hauled up to the third floor by a chain as their blood makes the journey to the concrete beneath them. Sometimes the blood doesn’t even look like it’s flowing and Dan can trick himself into thinking it’s just a skinny, red pillar.

Arin throws his pallet hard into the sink. Dan turns off the TV and stares at the wilting plant sitting on their coffee table.

“What’s the name of the painting?” Dan asks after a moment.

 “This?” Arin spins the easel and shows his artwork.

 “Yeah. What are you calling it?” Dan asks, taking in the screaming figure and the red erupting from their stomach.

 “I’ll call it entrails,” Arin says, looking at it with a mixture of pride and disgust.

 “I like it,” Dan says and doesn't know if he’s lying. They spend a few hours sitting around on their phones. Arin keeps licking his lips, putting on chapstick, and licking his lips again. Dan wonders what flavor chapstick it is.

“I think I’m going to hit it,” Arin says eventually, “goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” Dan avoids looking at the painting as he retreats to his bedroom. He replaces the quarters in his collection before laying down and imagining he’ll wake up to find the artwork in the corner of the room somehow. Maybe the cows will move it, Dan thinks, or perhaps cows are too innocent to desire revenge. This thought is somehow worse, and Dan spends a while trying to convince himself ghost-cows are real before he hears screaming from across the hall. He listens to the mushy sounds of human beings being ended and stares at the ceiling. All so red and squishy, Dan thinks. He stares at the dark so long it looks like there’s flakes of salt suspended in front of him. He can’t shut his eyes. Whenever he does, he sees the cows high above him, he sees the man getting his head blown open, and he smells their innards.

Sleep strangles him after hours of restless staring. After being asleep for an indeterminable amount of time, Dan awakens to a dreamy state of consciousness. He thinks about how dreams are like the space between thoughts. He rolls over and returns to the bliss. He’ll face the entrails again in the morning.