is where I learned to keep my mouth shut during the summer of ‘81 while carrying a
frozen mix of lobster shells, haddock heads, guts, & purina mink chow in foul steel

buckets. I wore my Father’s old boots, cracked leather like burnt toast that smelled
of marlboros & motor oil. I was fifteen & quickly becoming fluent in the language of

men who didn’t say much but were planning a murder with their eyes. That summer,
mornings held heat delicate like storms inside a glass jar. My job was to feed the mink.

Mink paced until sleep or skinning. Manny coughed like he was in charge, regret anchored
in his lungs. He called me ‘new meat’ & laughed when I flinched every time the mink

shrieked. With rubber gloves, I palm-ladled paste so thick & near-frozen cold my arm
turned blue-numb. Their mad red August eyes tracked my hand as I plopped the slop

on top of each cage. Mink don’t blink, just stare like tiny generals plotting their next move.
Manny said “Don’t name them. They bite harder if they know you care.” By 10 a.m. it

was 90 degrees & time to clean the cages. We’d fill half-rusted wheelbarrows with pounds of
mink shit, the stench so putrid it made second grade cafeteria cleaner smell like Chanel &

taught you to breathe shallow, not swallow. I got my friend Vinny a job there. He never made
it to lunch. My lunch was packed in wax paper. Two folded slices of baloney like tongues

pressed into silence as we ate on crates behind the freezer. The pit was the worst. A low throat-
thickening burnt offering tide. The flies came as judgment, a vibrating black-hole-sun

murmuration so thick you had to walk through it sideways. If hell had a smell this would be
it; it entered your skin & drooled at night onto your pillow like a wet kiss. We dumped

everything there. Piss, shit, blood, guts, bile: whatever came out. The salty-dredge ammonia
stink stuck to you like teeth. What stayed with me was the stillness between things,

the pause between one cage & the next. The flies’ low electric humming despair. How
Manny talked to the mink like they owed him something. Once a mink got out. He was

standing on a cage, not frantic, surveilling as if language were listening. A shovel screamed
my name like an order. He looked at me and leapt, black-spined spiral arced against the

‍aluminum sky. Manny and a few of the workers chased the mink with rakes and snares.
I froze, cheering silently with a slight sneer hoping the mink would be swallowed

by the pines. I think about that mink, how he stood tall & calm, how he never shrieked, how
he didn’t hesitate or look back, how maybe freedom is just not asking for permission.