Notes from the Rendering Floor

Fiction

November 12th The gold is stubborn this year. The griffins arrived from the highlands in crates too small for their wings, their plumage matted with a mixture of dried salt and old blood. My task is the plucking: a slow, rhythmic extraction of the aurum-tipped primaries. The feathers do not come away cleanly; they tear. By noon, the air in the rendering shed is thick with a metallic dust that coats the back of the throat, tasting of copper and ozone. Mr. Gable stood over me for three hours, stopwatch in hand, noting the seconds it takes to clear a single wing. He does not care for the creatures, only the weight of the crate at the end of the shift. November 19th We moved to the hydra vats today. The work is wetter, colder, and significantly more tedious. We make a clean incision in the secondary neck, wait for the regenerative bile to surge, and pump it into the pressurized canisters for the textile mills. The bile is a luminous, sickly green; it stains the skin for weeks. The beast is kept in a state of perpetual partial death, its heads sprouting and collapsing in a cycle that mirrors the ticking of the factory clock. I spent an hour watching the third head. It did not hiss or snap. It simply watched me with a pale, gold-flecked eye, its pupil contracting as I tightened the valve. I found myself apologizing to it, though the sound was lost in the roar of the steam pipes. December 4th Cold snap. The grease in the rendering troughs has begun to congeal, requiring us to heat the vats with coal fires that make the shed an oven. We processed a sphinx this morning. The creature was old, its riddle-tongue long since cut out by the handlers at the docks. It was surprisingly light, mostly bone and ancient, dry skin. As I stripped the iridescent scales from its flanks, the creature shifted its weight and pressed its forehead against my shoulder. It was not a gesture of aggression, but a leaning; a request for support. I held it there for a moment, ignoring Gable's shout from the catwalk. For ten seconds, we were the only two things in the room that were not machinery. December 12th The quotas have increased again. The street lamps in the West End require more bile, and the nobility want their gowns gilded by New Year. We are working sixteen hour shifts now. My hands are permanently stained a bruised purple from the chimera gall, and my lungs feel as though they are filled with wet wool. I no longer see the divinity in the beasts; I see only the yield. I see the volume of the marrow, the density of the horn, the viscosity of the blood. I am becoming a part of the rendering process, a human tool designed to convert the miraculous into the mundane. I wonder, when I finally break, what part of me they will find useful for the lamps.