“Meat Shop”

Saturdays the shop opened late. They were the only ones awake at this hour, Pengpeng sitting on Mei’s lap by the windowsill, his diaper still warm and heavy from the night. The morning rushed up Mei’s shirt and chilled her necklace. As they waited, they battled the sunrise to see, two blocks away, a tan building that balanced between self-abnegating and outright ugly.

“Ready?” she whispered at the plump curve of Pengpeng’s cheeks.

And he gave her the hollow little smile that showed he was already transfixed, just by the waiting, just by the hour, his favorite hour of the week, the only time he ever stilled and listened.

There it began, from the tan building, the chant of the monks, a prayer that swept its endless palm over the lethargy of the gridded roads, the grime snailing down the signs of the first floor shops, the crows harassing the quiet, her thoughts roaming home against her will. The not-quite-words shimmered in the air. They were the very substance of the world at this hour, before the shop opened, when it felt like everywhere it was morning.

“No! I don’t want!”

Mei had set two pork buns in the aluminum steamer, and wisps of their odor floated through the kitchen. She could just barely tolerate the smell on Saturday mornings, her patience elongated by the not-quite-words still circling in her head. But not Pengpeng. He hated the smell, even though he never had to work in the shop. He screamed if anybody tried hiding pork in his food.

“Come on,” said Mei. “We’ll watch the monks as we eat.” She took his hand, and the hollow smile hovered over his face as he raced for the stairs.

Mei knew she was breaking two of Aunt’s rules: eating in the shop and bringing her cousin behind the counter, where the machines loomed. But Aunt wouldn’t be awake for another hour. And for an hour after that she would be tending to Uncle, cleaning his rotting leg by the single naked light bulb in his bedroom. And then she would eat breakfast and pore over her textbooks for some time, knowing exactly where Pengpeng was.

Aunt was sharp. Too sharp for the shop, where only the dumb and desperate could bear to work. She was too sharp for Uncle, who enjoyed taking the long route through calculations of investments and profits and taxes just to hear his mind spin some more. She was too sharp, even, for marriage, but not rich enough to be haughty in the face of Uncle’s business. In America.

Aunt had studied math in college and had asked her sister to mail the contents of her old bookshelves. Every couple of months another shipment would arrive. The books Aunt deemed useless – Buddhist philosophies that had snuck their way into the crates – she would donate to Mei, along with the customary words, “No letter.”

As they leaned against the counter, forcing pork down their throats, Pengpeng grew restless. He spat out the bite of meat he’d been chewing for the past minute.

“They’ll come,” Mei said. “They always do.”

A minute later she heard them. The soft shuffle of their feet. Pengpeng flew to the window and pressed his cheek against it and stood on tiptoes, his half-eaten bun smearing against the grimy glass.

Back at home, the monks had cradled their wooden bowls and begged. When her mother had sent her to the market on Saturdays, Mei had always carried a bowl of rice with her and cupped it into the bowl of the first monk she saw. Days when it rained and they squatted, orange cloaks pulled over heads, at the side of the road, she knew full well the rice would turn into porridge but cupped it in anyway, a little white mound, because she was Mei, dumb, unselfish Mei. Because she had been told to do so.

Here they were timid, their cloaks too bright for the gray cement and pastel walls. They walked as if chased by the sound of their own footsteps. Here, they did not beg.

Pengpeng was glued to the window as they approached, and Mei knew he would remain that way for minutes after they passed. She felt her insides squirming and ducked behind the counter as they appeared with their gazes consciously parallel to the shop’s fading banner. Fong’s Meats. Saturday Special: $2/lb pork belly.

When the last of the cloaks trickled from sight, she began to set up, gazing over her shoulder every few moments to make sure Pengpeng was still by the window. After weeks of effort, the sun had broken past the fog and raked through the shop, picking out the spatters of blood and bone she had missed, criticizing her jagged-shoreline nails. In the back room she pulled open the freezer and stacked frozen meat in her arms. Her fingers numbed and paled. She was shivering in her thin white working shirt and white plastic apron, but she had grown used to that. She could carry half a pig in her arms.

Back in the shop she laid the meat on the counter to cut into smaller pieces for customers. The machines gleamed, anticipating their daily waltz.

“Pengpeng, you need to go back up now,” she called.

Upstairs, Aunt had progressed to the kitchen. When she did so this early in the morning, she had argued with Uncle the night before and would not clean his leg. Not that they’d fought over anything of importance. It was always about whether to donate anonymously or publically to the temple, or whether to order a red replacement banner for the shop or a green one.

Whatever it was, Uncle’s leg would rot a little bit more.

“Come on.” Mei wiped her hands on her apron, prepared to carry her cousin upstairs. “Pengpeng?”

There was nobody by the window, only two greasy handprints and his pork bun splayed on the floor.

“Pengpeng?”

She turned slowly, dumb, as always. Dumb, after knowing the truth. She opened all the cabinets as she looked for him. Checked the freezer. The bathroom. The toilet drain. The trash can. The cabinets again. Then, still more slowly, she knelt at the window so she was Pengpeng’s height and pressed her fingers onto his handprints.

How tall they must have seemed. How alluring, the orange of their cloaks.

Upstairs, Aunt was washing dishes ferociously, something Mei remembered her mother doing only once, the night before Mei had left. Her father had just mentioned selling her bed to buy a desk for her brother. But they must have done it anyway, she thought. What else could they have done with her absence?

Mei’s mouth shaped into a soundless prayer while her fingers climbed to her necklace, a tiny jade pendant of a laughing bodhisattva that her mother had pressed into her palm the night before her departure. Usually she took it off before work, afraid blood would splatter it, afraid it would weigh her down with memory, but today she’d forgotten.

She bit her tongue, willing herself to focus. Aunt would be down in a couple of minutes to check on the shop and by then, she would surely have noticed something was wrong.

Like an insect in tree sap, Mei pushed through the door of the shop and plodded in the direction of the gray building. She thought of all the things that could happen to a toddler on the street, but she was nineteen and too tired to run.

Through the doors of the monastery she had never dared to enter, she heard the tapping of the temple block and, between each clop, an overbearing hush, a forbiddance of interruption. Holding her breath, she pressed her palm against the peeling veneer and pushed, spilling sunlight on the green-brown floor inside.

The space smelled of something smothered and smoldering. On the altar sat a gilded bodhisattva with clusters of incense bowing and breaking before it. There were offerings of oranges and prayer intentions written on red papers for a dollar apiece. If the single monk, small before the altar, noticed her, he did not make any acknowledgment. But even the back of his shaved head made Mei aware that she was still wearing the apron, already stained pink from the chunks of bloody ice that had chipped off the meat she’d carried earlier in the morning. And the boots. The disgusting rubber boots that were still not adequate to keep blood and water from her socks, the soles of her feet, the spaces between her toes. She stood just inside the door, afraid to move, afraid to make noise.

The rest of monks were still enveloping the neighborhood in their walking prayer. Mei wondered vaguely about the correctness of her hunch that Pengpeng was trailing behind them. She wondered when they would return to the monastery, or if they would recognize the little boy from the meat shop and bring him back home, or if they would whisk him away to salvation. Aunt would certainly be searching for both of them, but Mei couldn’t bring herself to plod back and explain everything. All she could do nowadays was wake up and work in the shop, listen to the customers, dance with the machines.

Even standing here stole her air. She couldn’t pinpoint the feeling, but it reminded her of the first time she had seen the carcasses. It had been her second night in America, and she hadn’t been able to sleep for three days and didn’t want to bother with trying anymore. She slid from Aunt’s stiff sheets and hunched her shoulders against the unexpected coldness, the lack of her brother’s breath from the other side of the room. The house was oblivious to her as she floated down the stairs and into the shop.

She would be working here soon. Earlier that day, Aunt had sat Mei in the corner and made her watch as she had operated the wheezing machinery to customers’ orders. The shop was almost peaceful now, draped in moonlight that forgave the counter for its muck, the floor for its chipped tiles, the wall for its stains, the rag for its putrid, raw smell. She tested the weight of the light on her bare feet and her arms, imagined crescents of blue cupping her chin, her forehead. Encased in the moment, she began twirling in the shop, watching the world liquefy around her, thinking, this was where she would live.

She stopped and laughed and leaned on the counter when she grew dizzy. Full of moonlight, she walked toward the freezer in the back. She had heard its humming from her room, directly above, as she had lain sleepless. With a sucking noise, the door came open and poured sharp whiteness and tendrils of pale air into the surrounding space. Inside were the carcasses, neat, silent stacks of pig and lamb and cow bodies. Mei expected them to bellow and leap out at her, but they stayed, enormous and patient and, most terrifyingly of all, amiable. Her breath froze in the billows of cold. All the moonlight inside her had gone.

A warmth on her back. The monks were returning and had propped open the door as they filed inside. And there was Pengpeng in the middle of the line, guided by a young monk with a clean, hollow face.

“You’ve walked far today,” he said to Pengpeng, nudging him in Mei’s direction.

Mei wiped the night from her eyes and found her cousin clutching her legs and burying his face against her dirty apron. She pulled him away and cleaned his cheek with the inside of her sleeve.

“Let’s go.”

To her surprise, he acquiesced, as if the monks were already a thing of the past.

“Thank you,” she murmured with the last of her breath as she led Pengpeng outside, and from behind she heard blessings she did not understand.

On the way back Pengpeng slipped his hand in hers, gripping her index finger that was oddly bent and hadn’t felt anything since she’d brought a knife on it during her first week of work.

“I’m sorry,” he said, to Mei’s surprise. Aunt had never taught him manners, for she spoiled him during the rare moments she paid attention to him.

The shop waxed into view, its fading, soiled red sign waiting for the next rain. In the back, the greasy old clock eked toward nine a.m., but the house was silent. Had Aunt gone out to search for them? Certainly she hadn’t dared, with her stilted English, to call the police.

When Mei led Pengpeng upstairs, she found the kitchen frozen: Aunt, mid-hiss, hands in fists upon the counter; Uncle, clutching his cane, sitting awkwardly at the breakfast table, his leg exposed and smelling of pus and antiseptic; the jagged pieces of a mug on the floor; a stool and every molecule of air overturned.

Pengpeng was shorter than the counter, and Mei rushed him back downstairs before he could tiptoe and see. He was tired, wobbling from all the walking he had done. She sat him on a stool in the corner, and he fell asleep.

In minutes, the first customers would arrive. Mei wiped the mess made by the pork thawing on the counter and flipped over the “open” sign.

To drive away boredom during her first weeks and months of work, Mei had brought into the shop one of the useless prayer books Aunt had donated to her. It was her mother, she knew, who’d slipped it into Aunt’s stack of textbooks to serve as protection against the carnality of their business. Mei kept it propped up by the cash register, as far from the meat as possible, but still, blood had spattered it. While she worked, she would memorize lines from the book, reciting them to herself as she sawed femurs and vertebrae, as she dug her fingers into flesh and fat.

“There is no body,” she told herself, “and no mind. There is no seeing, no hearing, no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no imagining. ” *

She told herself. And she told herself and told herself until her work became a prayer.

Today she noticed that the paper, after three years, had become so soiled that most of the words were no longer legible. For a moment she simply stood watching the pages, as if she could observe their disintegration. Then she checked the window for wandering monks. When she saw none, she picked up the brittle pages and reverently placed them in the trash, mumbling prayers as she did so, realizing that she had learned the entire book by heart.

The verses never ended. They bled into each other and looped back upon themselves as Mei nodded to customers, sliced and packaged meat, accepted payments and counted change. At twelve she closed the shop for lunch. Pengpeng still slept in the corner. Crumpling her apron onto the counter, Mei lifted him into her arms and carried him upstairs.

Aunt and Uncle were no longer arguing. They’d both given up and burrowed into their separate bedrooms, closed their doors. Mei deposited her cousin onto her own bed and with her blanket wiped the drool running down his chin.

There were still pork buns in the steamer, but she wasn’t hungry. On the opposite wall, in the living room, the Buddha statue watched her from behind the swollen red glow of electric candles. It had been Aunt’s idea to allow a sliver of worship into the house to prevent any smiting or doom that could befall them as a result of their business.

“Just like insurance,” she’d explained. “If you buy insurance, nothing will happen.”

On Saturdays they burned incense for the Buddha, but today nobody had remembered. With her hands still smelling of meat, Mei opened the drawer that contained incense and matches. She lit four sticks and offered them and bowed as she had done all her life. The Buddha smiled faintly, and Mei smiled back, as if the two of them now shared a joke.

Inside her collar, the bodhisattva laughed.

* Translation of excerpt from “Heart Sutra” taken from:

Boeree, C. George. “The Heart Sutra.” The Hippocratic Oath, webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/heartsutra.html.

Angela Yang, originally from San Francisco, is a freshman at Stanford University. She aims to focus on English, psychology, and East Asian Studies for the next four years in hopes of exploring and narrating the subtleties of the Asian American experience. She is a previously unpublished writer of short stories, novels, and occasional cathartic poetry.