The closed door notwithstanding, the proceedings bore audibly into the living room from the yard below, each in its proper turn:
The reel of the whetstone.
The fit of the scuffle—human, animal, human-on-animal.
The Wilhelm Squeal ringing in the timbre of a power saw. And so on.
I recalled the owner telling me of his decision to slaughter the pigs, though he hadn’t mentioned the day nor the hour. I folded my wrist over the arm of the sofa, glimpsing the long hand seconds before the call to prayer. Over the bovine death rattle, the Zuhr skirted the mosques in a melody at once delicate and peremptory, its tone trumpet-like from the minarets. Clouds broke the skyline as the filao trees swayed in the yard. The squealing endured.
Against the equatorial heat, I searched the tiles of the living room floor. An animal’s natural death is not irrational, I reasoned, but its audible slaughter… this was the soundtrack of nightmares under fever. Worse than the sight of it, I supposed. Or was it? I thought of my neighbor, an elderly man, stone-deaf. What of it, then—seeing pigs exsanguinated to the hum of atmospheric white noise? Surely that was no better. The question remained: to see or not to see—that edge to the jowl.
I swallowed to suppress a sudden thirst and leaned forward from the sofa. In the yard, a hawk offered peals of approbation and the cloud cover drained sunlight from the room. I looked again into the floor, and there in the span of tile flashed a prismatic brilliance—the abattoir’s crimson, death’s obsidian, the Sea of Galilee’s sapphire from the face of the Gadarenes. Such was my synesthesia, or delirium, uncovered—the sight of the sound.
Some hours later, I peered into the grave plot below; the yard’s dry plinthite had swallowed the gore. The carcasses had been stripped and refrigerated. The whetstone stored away. In like manner, I set the occasion down then renounced all knowledge of it. Neither did it come to mind.
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Image: MS Co_Pilot AI remixed