The Lamb
by Eleanor Dunne
Every Sunday, Juniper would go down to the church and get slaughtered. It was an art she had perfected by now—a professional obligation, really. As others would put on their Sunday best, zip up their dresses and pull on their gloves, Juniper would leave the townhouse, shutting the door firmly behind her (it had a habit of swinging open if it wasn’t secure), and make her way untidily through the cobbled streets. She always walked to the church despite its distance. It was improper to arrive with a chaperone, said her father at the dinner table that first night, her last night before her first slaughter. He had shown her the way the day before: remember, he said. And she does remember, remembers the way he tripped over the cobblestones like a stutter, his soft hand too tight in hers. She remembers thinking about the softness of his hands, and how it made the cobblestone feel so much worse when it dug into the palms of hers as he fell, and as she fell with him. She remembers how he watched her leave that first Sunday. How when she turned around, he was gone.
The church lies in the middle of the woods, a fair distance from the rest of the town and the furthest spot from her house. She used to whine about the distance when she was small, not grown-up like she is now at eleven. She asked about it once, after the slaughter passed ritual and became habit. Right on the knife’s edge of becoming old hat, she thought herself a veritable expert. After all, no one was there more than her, not even the priest. It was her bones they preached for.
He told her it wasn’t wise to pray where you live. There must be distance between Man and God, he said. We must not take His guidance for granted. We must earn the right to worship.
She asked why she must stay so far, when all her pasts lived here, in the walls.
He got quiet for a moment. Juniper almost thought he wasn’t going to answer, like he did when she asked silly questions to make the other kids laugh in Sunday School. Back when there were still other kids.
The building itself doesn’t seem imposing—if you don’t know how it was built. The clearing comes upon you suddenly, and there’s no path to guide the way. There would be woods, and then there would be a circle of trees around a patch of dirt, and finally a one-room house of sticks and shards of glass held in the middle like water in cupped hands. The steeple might have been sharp once, might have been a needle to mend the broken heart of sinners, but one storm or another must have snapped it off, as it now sits, a broken finger on a spindly hand. The front door is never locked, but Juniper goes around the back anyway. They don’t want her entering through the front. They don’t want to think that she has any resemblance to their children when she enters the church, eyes wide, little hands straining against the oak of the doors. No, Juniper heads straight to the cellar through the heavy bulkheads in the back that must always stay shut in case of rain. This is where she prepares herself.
Ever since she was young, Juniper never felt like she fit correctly into her body. She used to think maybe she was born a boy and her parents cast some sort of spell to hide it from her and then trussed her up in dresses and curls. She used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror, curl up in the bathtub, hold her chest where she’d just started to fill in, willing for the spell to wear off. If she looked hard enough, maybe her reflection would glimmer for just a second, just a blink — short enough to make any others think they were crazy for seeing it, but Juniper would know. She’d know, and then she’d know who she was, and then she could go.
In the church basement, there are no mirrors. There are no sharp edges except her own and the sacraments upstairs that will bless her. Everyone looked at her as if she were sharp, bleeding, teeth ridged like the blood-maw of a coyote looking down at a rabbit. Juniper wishes she were sharp. When she looks at herself, she can only see the soft mountains of skin promising womanhood. She cannot feel her bones when she squeezes her forearm, only the spongy dampness of moss after a storm. When she holds her eyes open in the wind, the moisture that gathers feels slimy and wrong, a rotted leaf wet from a rainstorm. Is there something inside her at all? Or is she built from spare parts, old twigs and fallen birds nests? That’s what the preacher told her when they used to rebuild her.
Now, in the church basement, Juniper strips off her clothing and looks at the cracked ceiling so her body isn’t in the bottoms of her eyes. The slaughter doesn’t really hurt. No more than a shot or a pinch would. After the first cut, she’s outside her body, in holding until they rebuild. The only way Juniper knows she’s meat is because she sees it, every Sunday.
The preacher isn’t cruel about it like one might expect. He’s as kind as a butcher can be when he opens her up, sternum through gut, and drains the blood; as kind as a starving man is when he rips into a meal. The blood goes into the floor, into the dirt, soaking into the foundation of the church. She’s learned that without her blood, nothing in the village grows. Tomorrow there will be rain and it will taste sweet on her tongue. Then her organs will be removed, one by one, heart and liver and stomach and all the other little bits she hasn’t learned the names for yet. This is the most boring part to Juniper, since her parts don’t even really go anywhere, just set aside to await being put back in. And finally, after the preacher has scraped the cavity with his little spoon and peeled all nutrients from the husk, he takes out the bones. Her bones, her bones — she wishes she could keep her bones! What other proof does she have that she’s not just meat all the way through? But they take them every week and they build houses and schools and carts with them, with her bones, and she can’t even feel them when they’re not hers anymore.
Sometimes she likes to imagine those houses that her bones build, and inside there’s a family, and the family is warm and housed and every night the father cooks a goose for the children and the mother tells a story before bedtime. And the love that belongs to the family belongs to Juniper because Juniper gave them that love from her bones.
But the preacher just takes branches from the forest and places them where he took her bones from and seals her guts back in, packs her with meat and sews her together again. On Monday, Juniper will go to the forest and wonder how much of her remains.