Ryan awoke to the cacophony of soft cries of the litter of newborn kittens that had been delivered last night.  The mother was unnamed; he had picked her up in the midst of a brutal snowstorm and until about a week later he had not known that she was pregnant.  The fact that he would have to manage a starving mother and her litter was a heartening prospect, as, although he was having trouble keeping himself afloat, he would have some company in the lonely hours after his shift at the slaughterhouse. 
In the dark of his bedroom, the painful illumination of the alarm clock read 4:35 am- 5 minutes before he had to wake up.  How long had he slept?  An hour?  Two hours?  Five minutes?  He slowly rolled over and scanned the image outside his window that grayly greeted him every morning in different variations- a solitary street lamp that, this morning peered through the dense fog that drifted along the dew soaked grass.  That’s what he felt like- a fog, a translucent cloud of particles that drifted wherever the wind took it.  It’s not that he didn’t want to go on.  There were goals; reachable, tangible.  Some of the goals he had set for himself were so close that he could almost grasp them with the calloused and bruised hands that handled the blade that turned those compassionate creatures into lifeless products, so wearily and yet so calculated.  But the reality of his achievements was what set him off.  Somewhere deep in his mind he knew that what mattered was not what he could feel, or hear, or taste.  Ryan believed that the things that truly shifted the sands beneath his feet were the things that operated behind the curtain.
Even so, he had to eat.
“This cat has to eat too.”
So he rose from the bed, planted his feet upon the chilled wood floorboards and ignited the fire in his mind that, however faintly burning, would hopefully get him through the day.
“What do cats even eat anyway?”
In the cupboard he had a half empty box of stale cheerios, and a carton of milk due to expire in two days.  He set the bowl of cheerios and the cup of milk as close as he could to her, so she could eat in a position that was comfortable for her and her kittens.
He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, grabbed his backpack (that contained his bloodstained meat coat), locked the door, checked it once, twice, and then left the house and the cats behind.
The cool morning air refreshed his skin, opened up his lungs, and for a brief second a small, worriless smirk appeared on Ryan’s face.  He found solace in the brief four to five seconds of clean, cool air, and truly despised the twelve hours of a hot, blood soaked, noxious existence that awaited him.
The grit, the continuous disgust, the stench, was all lost in the monotony of his work.  His shift was not long.  The hours were grueling, they were unbearable, but not long.  The hours that Ryan spent in that place could not be measured in time because they were lifeless.  They were bereft of any moments that were capable of being sorted as memories.  As soon as he began to cut the flesh of the animals, he was no longer himself.  He was absent from the world because there was no purpose in the way that he spent his life. The only thing he asked himself every single morning was, “Why am I doing this?  Who am I helping?”
Ryan pulled into the dimly lit parking lot behind the monolithic white structure that he knew would digest him for the next twelve hours.  He reached for the key in the ignition and paused for a moment.  The static-y voice on the radio said something about the economy, how it is set to fail and we are all doomed.  He breathed in deeply, burying the dread of staying in that place for another day, breathed out, and shut the car off.
“Okay, let’s go.”
With his backpack slung over his shoulder, he calmly paced towards the rusted metal doors of the slaughterhouse.  He retrieved a cigarette and placed it between his lips.  As he lit it, the embers revealed the dense layers of fog that blanketed him.  His boots stuck in the wet gravel and pulled him down with every step.
He looked up at the doors and the doors looked back down at him, and Ryan thought that they grinned at him.  They were mocking him.  They were laughing at him, because they knew what Ryan thought of the place, and they knew how powerless his thoughts really were.  They were saying, “It sucks to be you.  It really does.  And you can’t do anything about it.”   
The doors continued to laugh as he pushed through them.  The stench hit him hard.  The fear came through the surface and, while acknowledging it, he immediately stomped it out in a frenzy of intrinsic panic.  It wouldn’t help him today, it never helped him.  He thought about the cat and how all those kittens would die if he didn’t make it through today.  Hell, he wouldn’t make it through the month if he didn’t come up with the money for rent.  He was bound here.
He saw that all the lights were off except for one that lit up a room on the far end of the building on the second floor. His boss had arrived early and was working on some paperwork in his office.  He eyed
him and nodded a somber greeting.  Ryan nodded back and made his way across the long, stained, concrete floor towards the locker room.  Each step reverberated throughout the cavernous inside of the slaughterhouse.  The echoes were the cackling of the iron doors that greeted him each morning.  The locker room found him in it, an elongated stone room painted white, with rows of lockers on both sides with the only source of light being one single suspended ceiling lamp.
22-20-16. The satisfying click, and the sight, the smell of the rusted, corroded metal.  His locker looked like the inside of a body.  The brown-red rust crawled across the surface of the metal like a fungus crawling down the sides of the trunk of a dead tree.  Everything in the slaughterhouse looked alive.  The machines, the walls, the floor, the tools.  Alive, breathing; but not living.  Pumping blood to places where it may or may not be needed.  And Ryan sensed it, and it crawled inside of him and it ate away at him, like the rust ate away at the inside of his locker, and the doors that barricaded him inside.
“What is it with this place?”
He peeled off his shirt and took a seat on the bench.  He held his bloodied apron in his hands and sort of stared at it for a while.  He didn’t think about anything for a long time.  Who knows how long he sat there, the time didn’t matter.  He was there now, and he would be there for as long as it took.
“Ryan, get to work.  Jim is out; it’s only you working the saw today.”
Jim was out, and it was only him working the saw today.
He found himself at his station, staring at the blade in his hand.  The first of the innumerable dead cows in the assembly line hung from its hind legs helplessly.  Ryan’s job wasn’t just to cut precisely from the base of the groin to the base of the throat.  His job was to turn a creature into a product, to transmute
something sacred into something expendable.  He flipped the switch on the blade, as well as the one in his mind.  He turned off the human being and turned on the machine.
Hours upon hours, the blood soaked into his clothes, into his hair, under his fingernails.  The skin peeled away so easily, letting loose everything that gave life to the organism.  Each one was the same.  Ryan became lost in the muscle memory of where to cut, how hard to press, and when to release.  Each moment felt like an eternity, but when Ryan would bring himself back into the reality of his existence, he would understand all too well that a moment is just a moment, a fraction of time.  Each one was the same.
Except this next one.  This one gave way to the barrier that Ryan had put up between himself and his work.  This one made a noise, and faintly, Ryan saw that from inside the cow, something was moving.  The fear that he had so quickly quelled rose up to greet him.  He raised the saw, and began to cut, but just below the surface, so as to keep whatever was inside from being damaged.
A human hand reached out from the first opening.
Another from lower in the incision.
The hands pulled at the tear and in doing so, allowed a head to escape from the innards of the dead animal.
A man, painted crimson, pulled himself out of the product that Ryan was responsible for and collapsed in front of him.  The man, sobbing, hugged his knees against his chest and breathed fast, short and shallow breaths, as a puddle of blood inched out around him like ice cream melting off of a cone that had been left out in the hot sun for too long.
Ryan stood there, breathless, speechless, mindless, and waited for something to happen.  The voice of his boss was calm and collected.
“You were never supposed to know.  You were supposed to be a simple mechanism- a cog in the machine.”
“What the hell is happening?  Who is that man?”
“Who he is, who he was, who he might’ve been- it doesn’t matter.  He’s nothing.  He’s one of many, a single drop in the ocean of evolutionary failure.”
His boss dropped to his knees and bowed his head.  He reached behind and pulled forward a zipper that ran up and across his skull and down the entire front side of his body.  The flesh fell to the floor like a deflated balloon.
“Behold the apex predator, the peak of evolutionary progression.”
In front of Ryan stood an ungodly creature.  A vile orchestration of human and cow.  Black hooves, planted firmly on the ground, held up muscular hind legs that were covered in coarse black hair.  At the waist, the torso began to transform into something resembling a human male body.  At the base of the abdomen protruded six pink udders, and above that was a chest that bulged with dense muscular definition.  The shoulders were broad, and the arms were thick, like haunches of meat, but defined.  There was a snout, but not as long as that of an actual cow.  His breaths were short and powerful.  His eyes glowed hot red with merciless hatred and pitiless disgust.
“What will you do, Ryan?  Where will you go?  You are the only one left.  There is nothing, no one to help you.  There is only you who needs to be recycled, now that you know of what has been done here. 
Your body will be used for the creation of the most beautiful, the most powerful organism to ever dominate the Earth.  The age of men is over.  The time of the cow-man has come.”
Ryan trembled.  “This isn’t real..”
“This is more real than you know, Ryan.  What you know now is more true than anything you have ever known.”
Ryan could only think of the cat, and the litter of kittens that he had taken into his home.  He thought about the fact that he, the only human left in Iowa, had taken them in, and how alone he was in nurturing them, in binding his life to theirs.