She was nine, maybe ten, and she zipped the folds of her puffy winter coat as high as they’d go, goose down and nylon and the metallic kiss of the zipper’s zigs and zags to her chin. Her legs––splayed before her in a narrow V shape with her bottom firm to the concrete, long john and leg warmer clad––sheltered a single bottle of pink nail polish. She was working the brush over her left-hand index finger with a sort of frenzied precision that only lunatics and little girls had the capacity for. The name of the polish was stardust, though the bodies that swung above her head were no more celestial than they were hot. Hanging was the process of maturing meat by stringing up the carcass from hooks. Hanging out was what she was doing, what she’d always done in the meat locker at the Quinn Brothers Butcher shop on Sunday afternoons, while her father inspected the flank cuts in the display case with an obsessive gaze.

Daisy thought nothing peculiar of her father’s wont to shut her in the locker. A butcher’s shop was no place for little girls, and he told her this in ritual as he tied the back knot of his bloodied apron around his bulging waist. The sight of the blood on the white apron––dried in splatters and smears of pinkish brown––had always been enough to keep Daisy from asking questions. She was an inquisitive child, adored by her sixth grade art teacher and, in fairness, most of the staff at O’Malley Elementary. It was only the art teacher, Ms. Lionel, who had ever gotten the inkling that perhaps Daisy knew more about certain things than a child should. Children were good secret keepers if it seemed as if there was no secret to be kept, and in art class Daisy’s paint brush strokes read religious practice.

And practice she did.

Once she had finished her nails Daisy subscribed to the ritual she had created for herself with reverence. The nearest hanging carcass might’ve lived and breathed no longer than 72 hours prior, and now rather than rest upon fine china in seared chunks it served as an icebox of sorts, freezing the top layer of polish to Daisy’s nails with its cool radiation. The little girl held her hands up over her head, palms facing inward toward her skull, and hovered her nails half an inch from the hanging body. She counted, in her mind: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…thirty Mississippi. And lowered her arms in a grand and theatrical sigh of relief before running the pads of her fingertips over the polish. Her deceased company never failed to provide her manicure a quick finish, and the entire ordeal, to Daisy, was not strange.

2

Behind the counter of Quinn Brothers butcher shop, Gordon Quinn’s red-stained fingers were punching a series of figures into the old fashioned register. He and his lazy-two-faced-good-for-nothing-brother who was, for all intents and purposes the wizard behind the curtain of the Quinn Brothers, had never replaced the register from back when the business had started in ‘79, under their father’s ever-disdainful eye. Gordon figured: why fix something that ain’t broke? And it was in fact that very thought he was having when the bell above the front door chimed gaily, heralding in a woman who looked as if she’d walked off the set of a Burning Man documentary.

It was early, still––Quinn Brothers opened at eight on Sundays, though Gordon had been up since 5––and the woman who stood examining the newspaper stand beside the door now looked as if she hadn’t slept well. Dark circles stamped the space beneath the rims of her eyes, and as they turned from the most recent copy of the Times to the counter, Gordon found himself spurred toward a state equal parts perplexed and defensive. This was not the sort of patron Quinn Brothers saw often, this dark-circled woman in her long flowing skirt, hiking her tote bag up on her arm, but rather the sort of patron who only pretended to be such to peddle some PETA-quest of the month, perhaps a high-horse riding vegan conversionist who had come to condemn him and his business to hell.

“Can I help you, Miss?” Gordon called.

The woman, who was fishing around in her tote bag now––for what Gordon could only imagine was some tool of divine, bohemian sabotage––held up a finger in pause as she continued to dig through the bag, opening its top wide. She sighed through her teeth, and met his eye.

“Maybe,” she said. “Oh, my, I hope so.”

3

Daisy Quinn, inside the meat locker, had moved on to step two of her Sunday morning ritual. Step three, if you counted the initial painting of nails––but Daisy didn’t always. It was moreso a given, as the last week’s polish had oft chipped away by then in full, cleaning the keratin canvases she used as her warmup. Stardust would serve her well this week––her father’s taste in polishes was surprisingly akin to her own, and he delivered her to the locker each Sunday with a fresh vial from the corner store. A spectrum of pinks, of late. That was fine by her. Pink was in, would always be in: the fainter, softer, younger cousin of red. Red was a coveted polish cover, if only for Daisy’s wanting for what she couldn’t have. Her father had deemed red off-limits until high school.

The loophole to this rule sat in a series of jars along the back wall of the locker, whose sodium citrate-mixed contents would surely have been confiscated and disposed of by the disapproving hand of the USDA had they been privy to the knowledge. Quinn Brothers Butcher shop was locally sourced, however, and they’d escaped the eye of the country’s agricultural big brother for years, sometimes narrowly, more commonly with flying colors.

The jars of blood were kept in meticulous rows, shelves drilled high enough into the concrete block walls of the meat locker that Daisy had to use the chair her father kept in the far corner for hanging the carcasses to reach. She dragged it across the locker floor with both hands wrapped to its backrest, on which a series of carved flowers were engraved as garnish, and climbed upon its seat without the hesitation its wobbling legs might’ve warranted to the adult mind.

Daisy had grown attached to a singular, specific jar for her personal use. It was hidden amongst the others, pushed to what she in her mind regarded as the ‘way-back’. Her father never drew jars from the way-back, even when the rare customer seeking the final component of their black pudding recipe came knocking. Fresh blood from the front would do for those patrons––so long as they kept quiet about how they’d acquired it––but the way-back belonged to Daisy.

She sorted through the shelf now, standing on the wobbling chair on tip toes, until her fingertips connected with the jar she’d hidden in the way-back. She’d left it standing at an angle, so that rather than feel amongst glass faces she could search for an edge. Daisy was a child laden with what some might’ve called, in hyperbole, idiosyncratic brilliance. Wisdom beyond years, rather, and the little girl pulled the jar from the way-back, pinwheeling her arms in a motion half-balancing act, half-triumph.

Daisy hopped from the seat of the chair, converse sneakers thudding dully on the concrete floor, and dragged her father’s chair back to its respective corner with the jar of blood cradled in one arm. The jar was half empty.

4

At the head of the store, Gordon Quinn had come around the counter. He was moving slowly, feeling a bit as if his body was treading through deep water, and he couldn’t tell why or when he had become so nervous. The woman with the tote bag paid this no mind. She was glancing around the butcher shop as if noticing her surroundings for the first time, and when her eyes landed on the backlit display of tenderloin her nose wrinkled in absent-minded disgust. When she turned to him the wrinkle was still there, as if it had gotten stuck in place.

“Gertrude Lionel.” The woman extended a hand, and the multicolored bangles on her wrist jingled with the motion. “Forgive my discomfort. I’ve been a vegetarian for years.”

“Gordon Quinn.” Gordon shook her hand––his was cold, calloused, and at her admission he was struck once more with the perplexity of her presence. There was something familiar about her name, and he couldn’t place it. He only wished the wrinkle in her nose would straighten out. “I’ve got to ask ‘ya, then, Miss Lionel. What on god’s green one are you doing in here?”

As soon as he’d released her hand she had begun to walk, flowing skirt trailing behind her. Gordon followed without much pushback from his better knowledge. The wall opposite the counter was window-paned. Beside the windows stood a black metallic shelf of potato-chip bags, and Gertrude paused here to inspect the offerings before moving on toward the high top tables. Quinn Brothers sold cold cut sandwiches, heroes, the like. It wasn’t often a customer stayed to dine––the only regular that ate in house was an older fellow named Dave, or Doug. Turkey and swiss. Gordon’s memory for people had never been so ripe as his memory for meat.

Gertrude stopped at one of the high-tops, hoisting herself up and onto its stool. “I was hoping to talk to you about your daughter.”

Gordon froze mid-step. Glanced over his shoulder, toward the door behind the counter that gave way to the storage room, and the meat locker. “Daisy?”

Gertrude laughed: the sort of packaged, whistling pitched laugh that women sometimes coughed up when they lacked for words. She was rifling through the tote bag on her arm once more. It was an abnormally large tote bag, the type a family might pack foil-wrapped sandwiches and juice pouches in for a beach trip. She drew from it a slim manilla folder splattered in paint and slid it across the high top.

“Do you have another?” Gertrude asked.

Gordon, who hadn’t remembered sitting down, but found his weight firmly placed atop the stool opposite Gertrude’s, only shook his head.

“I’d like to show you some of her artwork,” Gertrude said. “I’d like to know what you make of it.”

Gordon opened the folder, slowly, gingerly, and took no more than a glance at the top photograph. He knew what to make of it indeed.

5

Amongst the hanging bodies, Daisy Quinn’s eyes were narrowed in focus. The tip of her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth, lips pursed, and to an outsider she might’ve looked like some comical caricature of an artist. Though, to an outsider, notice might’ve passed so quickly from Daisy’s expression to her medium that the humor of the image was drained entirely.

The far wall of the meat locker was the darkest––the fluorescent overheads flickered and hummed, dim now with age, and served only to cast the shadows of the hanging bodies Daisy kept company with onto its concrete surface. This wall was her primary canvas, her starry night, and her hands were covered then in the blood from the way-back jar.

Her palms would be stained red for days. As would her cuticles––it was the closest thing to red nail polish she’d mustered at age nine beneath her father’s roof, and though the meat locker was her father’s roof as well she secretly thought of it as her own. The rules did not disappear here but were distorted in a way. To be inside of the meat locker was to experience a private reality, an unreality of sorts, in which the warping of common sense and better knowledge was done with such subtle cunning that neither her father, the warper, nor Daisy, the warped, recognized it for what it really was.

Daisy swept two fingers along the concrete face of the wall in a long brushstroke. Stepped back. Admired her work. Dipped her fingers back into the blood jar, and darkened the line.

6

“She’s been coming in with red hands,” Gertrude said. “Which was all fine and well when we were painting poppies––her poppies were so lovely, Mr. Quinn––but now we’ve moved onto charcoal sketching. And Daisy’s hands are still red.”

Gordon, whose hands were red as well, stuffed them into his pockets beneath the high top counter. The photograph on the top of the pile inside of the manila folder was a charcoal sketch, rudimentary children’s art with the underlying flair of the mature artist. Presumably Daisy’s: for what other child would’ve chosen to sketch the beheaded carcass of a half-frozen pig?

“Does she work here?” Gertrude asked. “With you, I mean.”

Gordon’s lips pressed hard and thin. “Never. Not my girl.”

“Does she paint at home?” The art teacher was fiddling with the corner of the photograph, and the charcoal pig’s body reflected within it bounced and glared in the light shed through the window pane beside them.

“I set up some canvases in her mother’s old office, but…” Gordon began, and stopped. It wasn’t often he spoke willingly of Daisy’s mother, his late wife, and the phrase had passed so colloquially from his lips to this strange woman that it startled him. The pit in his stomach bottomed out, and all at once everything felt rotted, spoiled and festering in the air between them. “Y’know, you’ve gotta lotta nerve interrogatin’ me like this. What are you tryin to get at here, Miss Lionel?”

Gertrude, for all of the soft edges she wore, leaned forward. “Daisy is a sweet girl. Talented artist, too. But I recognize blood when I see it, Mr. Quinn. This girl must be washing her hands in it, the way I see things.”

“I’d never let my daughter near a knife in here,” Gordon said. “Animal waste, neither. We run a respectable business, Miss Lionel.”

The front doorbell jingled. A man dressed in business attire with a bluetooth phone connected to his ear looked around, noted Gordon at the high top, and walked up to the counter. He spoke quietly into the bluetooth receiver, and it was only then that Gordon realized how loudly he and Gertrude had been speaking. They looked at one another for a long moment, Gertrude’s jaw opened on its hinges as if to continue.

“Gimme a moment,” Gordon said, barstool screeching as he pulled it from beneath the high top.

“Take your time.” Gertrude didn’t watch him retreat toward the counter, and instead spoke half to herself, softly, thumbing the photograph of the charcoal pig’s body. “I’m not going anywhere.”

7

Between the concrete walls of the meat locker, Daisy Quinn heard voices. This was the first instance of unusual circumstance she had ever recognized as such during a Sunday stay in the meat locker. One of the voices was her father’s––his, she knew like her own reflection, like her own name. The other was feminine, light, and its singsongy intonation lit in her mind recognition. But what was Ms. Lionel doing at the butcher shop? Everyone in Daisy’s class knew she didn’t eat meat. Not even bacon.

Ms. Lionel was a wacky sort of teacher, and Daisy thought that that was how art teachers were meant to be. Daisy had once heard her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Corado, speaking to one of the gym teachers in the hallway. Mrs. Corado had called Ms. Lionel ‘eccentric’, a word Daisy had not known but had pried her mother’s old Merriam Webster from the bookshelf of her former office to define, using the office chair to reach the top shelf in a familiar tiptoed motion. The definition she’d found had included the word ‘whimsical’. Daisy preferred that to wacky. She loved Ms. Lionel.

Sometimes Daisy thought that Ms. Lionel loved her a little bit too––she’d been one of the only teachers at O’Malley Elementary that’d attended Daisy’s mother’s funeral, three years ago now, and she never asked questions when Daisy wandered into the art room during recess. Rather, she’d handed Daisy the paintbrush box.

But Ms. Lionel didn’t sound so singsongy now, nor whimsical. She sounded upset, and it gave Daisy enough of a start that she lowered the way-back blood jar to the floor of the meat locker and padded to the door, whose small rectangular window looked out only into the hallway, toward the storage room door beyond. Her hand drifted toward the door knob. It was rusted and cold to the touch, as was everything in the locker, and Daisy paused with her pink painted fingertips on its handle.

As to whether or not her father locked the door, Daisy had never entertained the question. Gordon never locked the door, because he’d never needed to. The rules were the rules. No interrupting father’s work. No babysitter on Sundays, so she had to come to the butcher shop. No red nail polish until high school.

Daisy lifted a bloodstained hand to her chin. It left a series of red fingerprints there. The handle lowered at her touch. Clicked open. And Daisy found then that some rules were easily broken. Some were meant to be.

8

Gordon Quinn watched the man with the bluetooth headset leave, packaged sirloin in hand. The man strode out onto the sidewalk, into daylight, and down the block. The sound of his car chirped in welcome. Gordon wondered why it seemed so dark in the butcher shop––the window panes were yellowed now with age, filmy, overdue to be washed.

He was rounding the counter once more to return to the high top, opposite Ms. Lionel, when a very small voice struck his heart with such a quill of doubt and fear that for a moment he disbelieved what he had heard entirely. At the high top, Ms. Lionel stood. Gordon turned, slowly, toward the direction of the storage room. The direction of the meat locker.

“Daddy?”

Daisy stood in the doorway behind the counter with one hand on the heavy iron door and the other hovering over her lips. Her chin was smeared across in the color red, and her long winter coat was unzipped unevenly at the top, as if the zipper had come loose on one side. Her nails were bright pink––the color Gordon had plucked from the top shelf of the Essie nail polish display at the corner store that past week––and the paint job was muddled beneath a browning coat of oxidized blood, not so much stardust as rust flakes.

Gordon sputtered. “Daisy! What are you doing––”

Ms. Lionel, at the same moment: “Daisy!”

The girl brightened, stepping out from the doorway with one hand still clutching its edge, propping it open. “Hi Ms. Lionel!”

The color had drained from Gordon’s face in a clean flush at first, and now it grew red, a blank canvas painted in bloated, blotchy color that began at his collarbone and sprinted upward toward his cheeks. A single vein on his forehead protruded and pulsed there. His head was pounding.

Gertrude had rushed behind the counter then, tote bag and manila folder forgotten at the high top, and she knelt to eye level with the little girl. “Are you alright, sweetheart?”

Daisy, who was feeling quite good about her rule-breaking just then, quite good indeed, nodded frantically at Ms. Lionel’s question. Her eyes were alight and gleaming, her nose pinkish with chill. “There’s something I want to show you!”

Gordon found that he was unable to move. Nor speak. There was no motion toward explanation, not a syllable of justification he could fathom passing from his windpipe into open air, and he had heard of the state of shock but not experienced it until quite then. His mind ran on a looping reel, a singular question: why today? Today of all days? Why today?

Daisy was safe in the meat locker. No knives, no tools, no unsanitary waste. She was nearby, preoccupied with her polish––it wasn’t as if he could leave her home, unattended. But a butcher’s shop was no place for a little girl. It hadn’t been an imprisoning of choice, but of necessity. Daisy herself had never complained. It was enough for a girl not to have a mother––Gordon hadn’t been able to protect Daisy then. Had it been enough, to try and protect her now?

Gordon watched Daisy lead Ms. Lionel down the hallway toward the meat locker. In his mind, Gordon watched Quinn Brothers butcher shop go up in flames.

9

Daisy Quinn propped open the door to the meat locker. Ms. Lionel stood a pace behind her, wrapping her arms around her torso. Tendrils of cold escaped the locker doorway, ghostly plumes of white that emanated from the room as if it lived and breathed on its own, hungry. It took Ms. Lionel a moment to recognize the carcasses for what they were, dangling from their hooks like grotesque party streamers. Her recoiling was entirely internal, for the girl’s sake, and when Daisy urged her forward with a small and beckoning hand, Ms. Lionel did as she was told.

“I’ve been painting in here all year, Ms. Lionel,” Daisy said, glancing backward over her shoulder as she wove through the hanging bodies, unfazed, hardly noting their presence. “My best yet!”

Ms. Lionel tried and failed to smile. ‘Your best yet’ was a compliment she often gave to students in her class. To hear it now, in this place, Ms. Lionel thought she might be best off never speaking the phrase again.

Daisy stopped at the far wall of the meat locker. Spread her arms in a wide ‘ta-da’ motion, and looked upward at the art teacher eagerly. Ms. Lionel, standing beside the girl now, felt her breath catch in her throat.

The far wall of the meat locker was covered in mural. Done up in a spectrum of red, some so dark and thick it congealed and crusted, livening the texture of the wall, some so faint that it appeared pink, a shadow, a bruise of its neighboring hues. Pictured: a rolling nighttime landscape in which there were no stars but beheaded bodies smattering the night sky. Some of them were tiny, pinpoints that could be made out as rudimentary animal carcasses only if you were to lean forward and squint. Others were painted as shooting stars, long and distended.

The hills that rolled beneath them were marked with pasture fences, filled with livestock, looking up.