12
Silage
It was the spring of 2011, and I wanted to be in Italy. Marco was being tiresome and monogamous. He and his Borghese donna had gone ’round and ’round in infinite elliptical loops that ended with Marco’s abjuring my company. We had so much history, Marco and I, sweet years layered like sfogliatelle. My time with Marco marked my movement from youth to adulthood, and for this reason alone he was special. I wanted to be in Italy, but to be close enough to Marco to brush hips yet not do it was unendurable. He was, he said, never straying again.
“Mai. Non voglio attraversare il confine Stigio,” he said. Never. I will not cross the Stygian boundary.
Marco always had a talent for mistaking the melodramatic for the poetic. It was something I was accustomed to, even if his newly found iron will to adhere to the bonds of his marriage was not.
And yet, if I must be honest, to have Marco go over all monogamous was not entirely unexpected. He ran in seasons, and the time had come for his trudging convention. No doubt, Marco’s donna had nosed out some particularly juicy bit of inconstancy and had harangued her husband into abstemiousness. Whatever the reason, Marco’s current cyclical return to his marriage vows was displeasing and inconvenient to me. I wasn’t looking forward to going to Italy and having to seduce a new lover. Nearly fifty, I was beginning to find it laborious—it wasn’t the seduction, exactly. I looked good, and I’ve always been as charming as a hungry cat when I needed to be. It was more that performing the dance had grown tedious. I didn’t want to tell someone my history; I didn’t want
to be bothered to invent a new one. I wanted Marco and all our weight, all our wrinkles, all our textures, all our complexities.
He was having none of me. I wouldn’t accept it.
I was therefore forced to do something I had never done before: I pitched a story on a lover. I finagled some contacts at Gourmand, I promised them the inside scoop on the hottest “bio” butcher in Rome, and I sold it. I suspected Marco would see me to get a story about his meat empire in a glossy American magazine, and I was not wrong. Was crossing the line between work and my intimate life an untrammeled delight? No. But it was a line that was necessary to get my way with Marco.
As much as my decision to leave restaurant criticism was predicated on my getting fired from Eat & Drink and the need to bolster sales of my second book, it was not a decision I regretted.
Times had changed in the more than twenty years I’d been writing about food. Everyone in food seemed to know everyone else; it was one long human centipede of fuckwittery, where not only was everyone suddenly a writer or a celebrity, but also chefs and sommeliers and even bloody butchers were stars, crossing oceans and running symposiums, Facebooking and tweeting and Snapchatting about the whole incestuous, writhing mess. It was an ugly, self-cannibalizing machine of gratuitous glad-handing, but who am I to buck convention when convention serves me.
I wasn’t happy, not with Marco’s moral existential crisis, not with having to create a pretense to see Marco—who was really mine by droit du seigneur—not with having to compromise my ethics, and not with having to pretend I was interested in his clever mass disassembling of carcasses. I was not happy at what my life had pushed me to do, but who is.
Yet I had to wear the pretense gladly when in late spring of 2011 I went to Italy to interview Marco, landing first in Lombardia, where he fattened his cattle, moving next to Toscana, where he killed them, and arriving finally in Roma, where he butchered them, a trip ripe with the many smells of livestock. My nose filled with the pointy brown scent of cattle shit and the patient green smell of cattle breath, the acrid vinegar smell of cattle piss and the rich, coppery smell of cattle blood—great shining oceans of cattle blood, draining into
sluices arranged in the kill floor. I saw giant pellucid piles of cattle nerves and caul fat, and I watched the peculiar way that the quieted eyes of cows lolled as their throats were professionally sliced. I witnessed the snick of the blade and the mercurial quiver of death running quick through a one-ton animal. I saw hides slick and shiny with gore, and I saw lines of men bent over tables of meat, intent as rabbis over scrolls, taking apart the cows with lawful precision. I saw chickens, too, so many flappy birds, and sheep, bleating like human children, their long-lashed eyes innocent and bright—until they were neither.
I visited Marco’s empire and saw it for what it was: a well- planned, carefully orchestrated machine bent on the extermination of animals for our gastronomical pleasure. And I walked through it all, rubber boots pulled over my Wolford stockings, tight smile on my face, feigning interest in order to be closer to Marco, incessantly asking myself one question: Why.
The answer was so that I could kill and eat him.
I don’t mean to boast, but I cannot forbear saying this: aside from my two books, Ravenous and Voracious, killing Marco is my finest achievement. Nearly two years had passed since I had turned Gil into a delicate dish of tongue. I’d gleaned much from that harrowing experience—to research thoroughly, to plan for every eventuality without regard for likelihood, to leave nothing to chance, and, above all, never, ever to go near a boat. Killing Marco took a considerable amount of work, all made more difficult by the fact that I had to plan every step with an awareness of whether it would read as legwork for the Gourmand article or whether it would bind me to the crime.
Unlike the three previous deaths that were easily ruled accidents, Marco’s would look undeniably like a murder—there was nothing accidental about it. It was, as I envisioned it, to be pure, unadulterated, premeditated homicide, so I had to ensure that when the polizia came looking for Marco’s killer, their eyes would glide off me.
So much depended upon the daft schedule of Trenitalia and the unions so imbued with whimsy and given to strikes. In theory, Trenitalia, the national corporation responsible for rail travel in Italy,
is organized, codified, simple, and comprehensible. In actual lived experience, however, Trenitalia is chaotic, disordered, complex, and arcane. I’m sure there are some who understand the great mysterious force that is Trenitalia; the fascist conduttori, for one, and the persons who wrote Trenitalia’s adulatory Wikipedia entry, for another. To my thinking, the logic of Trenitalia was the worst kind of Italian disregard for rules. Even the Trenitalia website appears to have been created by workers who have a slender understanding of how humans think. It reads like it was written in Cyborg, fed through Google Translate into Italian, and slapped on to a webpage. More than one time, I’ve sat in the wrong Trenitalia car, taken the wrong train, or bought an online ticket for a trip other than the one I’d intended to take. And all this even before the trains mysteriously stop running because of a sciopero bianco, a work-to-rule strike, otherwise known as an “Italian strike,” when workers register protest by doing no more work than is mandated by their employment contracts. A butterfly flaps its wings in Chioggia, and a train running to Siena freezes on its tracks, such is the indescribable strangeness of Trenitalia.
It’s a fascist adage: “Say what you like about Mussolini, but at least the trains run on time.” This was true neither in Mussolini’s day nor today. Trains exist and there are many, which makes Italy already superior to the car-logged, rail-beleaguered United States, but don’t set your watch by them. However predictable, Trenitalia’s inconstancy is an issue when you’re planning a perfectly orchestrated murder from 4,000 miles away. I raise the bureaucratic specter of Trenitalia because much of the success of Marco’s murder rested upon it. The remainder hinged on my skill with knives.
I landed in Parma and took a train to meet Marco in Cremona, in Lombardia, Italy’s breadbasket, where Italians like to feed their cattle until fat and delectable. Following at Marco’s elbow, I visited the farms where his beef cattle, some 800 head of Chianini and Bianca Modenese—a lilting grass-green sea dotted with white, lowing lumps of patient mammal—fed before being dispatched to the slaughterhouse outside of Florence. Rather than raise their cattle from birth, Italian beef farmers mainly fatten the cattle born in other lands, usually Ireland, France, Poland, or Spain, depending on
where the beef farm sits on Italy’s thigh-high boot. Italy’s dearth of large, open plains makes difficult the raising of beef cattle, a suck of land and food even in wide-open spaces. There isn’t much grass-fed beef in Italy because there isn’t much grass. You want grass-fed meat, you go to the Americas, where there are plains for days; your basic Chianina is going to have grown fat eating corn, some hay, but mostly corn. Organically raised from birth without hormones or antibiotics, Marco’s pampered, plump cattle ate a mixture of free- range scrubland, trucked-in dry hay, and organic corn silage. It’s very, very difficult to make money as a meat farmer in Italy—in fact, most of the cattle industry lives squarely in the arterial red, hemorrhaging cash and requiring government subsidies. The fact that Marco was able to do it successfully, to do it organically, and to do it so elegantly made him and his business quite the story.
Although I pressed him until the moment I closed the zipper on my suitcase, Marco remained adamantly opposed to seeing me for sex. “Il mio cuore, anima, vita, cazzo—appartengono alla mia amata moglie,” he said to me before I left America. His heart, his soul, his life, his cock, they all belonged to his wife, enumerating his parts in escalating importance. Boarding my plane at JFK, I promised myself that if he gave in, gave up, and fell with sweetness into my bed, he would live for me to tell the tale. If he didn’t, I would tell a different tale. It was all up to him, you see, whether he lived or died. It was his body, his choice.
Waiting for Marco to unknowingly decide his fate, I learned where cattle were born, how they were fed, how they were moved, and I learned precisely how they were turned from sentient beings into comestible lumps of crimson and white. I learned how big cows were, what went on inside them, and how to calculate their value on the open market. I learned a lot about cattle during my week traveling with Marco, but primarily I learned that a beef farmer’s life revolves around two things: food and shit.
A beef cow shits up to fifteen times a day, a total of sixty-five pounds of poop, the weight of the average nine-year-old child. The problem is always, ever, unceasingly, what you’re going to do with that mountain of shit, a question that screams for an answer when you’re dealing with 52,000 pounds of shit a day, as Marco’s
operation was—and that’s not including the shit hillocks produced by his smaller chicken and lamb operations. From the perspective of the farmer, the meat on our tables comes in the service of finding ways to get rid of the abundance of shit excreted by the animal bound for the slaughterhouse. It’s an unappetizing circle of life, but once you see it, you can’t look away. An average cow produces 490 pounds of trimmed, edible meat; it also produces about 12 tons of shit, or 24,000 pounds, during its lifespan. Vast truckloads of shit must be moved, somewhere, to get that steak on the plate or that burger on the bun. Think about that the next time you unwrap your BK Double.
As I bided my time with Marco, I learned more than I ever thought I’d care to know about organic meat and the Italian slow food movement, the capitalistic dikes holding fast against the nefarious encroachment of agribusiness into Italy. I learned about dark meat, pH factors, lactic acid, stress, and why you as a meat farmer want your animals to be caressed into annihilation. I learned about kosher slaughter, kosher butchering, and kosher market share. I learned about the regional differences in what makes meat “good” in Italy, and in doing so, I realized exactly how dim and homogenized the American palate is. I learned a lot, and I stored all of it on my computer because, as much as it helped me write an excellent article (titled “Marco Iachino, the Natural King of Chianini,”
September 2013 Gourmand, nominated for a James Beard Award in magazine profiles), it tied me to Marco as subject of an article, not victim of a homicide.
I also learned many things that would not appear on my computer searches, a distinction I made in case my hard drive were to be scrutinized after Marco’s demise. These were things I did not want traced to my home, so I researched them in the last great bastions of public learning, libraries. I learned the precise ritual for kosher killing, memorizing its intricate choreography, its slitting of carotid arteries, jugular veins, vagus nerves, trachea, and esophagus. I mapped out this ballet on a human body, likewise the body’s necessary exsanguination, stripping of veins, caul fat, and sinews. I got achingly familiar with human anatomy. A few days with Hollinshead’s anatomy textbook, and I knew the inside of the human throat like the back of my hand.
And I memorized all the routes into, out of, and around Florence to Rome; it was dreary, tiresome, and vital information. All the best- laid plans will run to naught if you get caught by train strike, traffic, or accident on a roundabout. One Vespa rider goes splat like the wasp it’s named after, and the cold, uncaring universe undoes weeks of meticulous planning. The only thing to do was to learn it, learn it all, the trains, the roads, and the bus schedule; the ins, the outs, the ups, and the downs, because all roads may lead to Rome, but not all roads lead to an airtight alibi.
Prison food is part of the punishment. The food the prison feeds you is almost entirely comprised of meals made from cans, boxes, or mixes, made by people who can’t be bothered to care, and served to people who have no choice but to eat it. The meals abide by USDA regulations, which is to say that nutrition waves in its general direction. One thing most people don’t fully comprehend is that the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, is for all intents and purposes run by big agro. Let me put it another way: the USDA is a giddy dystopian wonderland designed for the pleasure of big agribusiness. There are only a handful of American agribusiness corporations, and they essentially dictate what Americans eat because they essentially control the USDA. For example, the USDA created the nutritional pyramid first and foremost to serve agribusiness’s interests—not human physical needs. And thus the meals served to schools and to prisons reflect not what the bodies of growing boys and girls or aging men and women need to thrive and/or survive; rather, these meals, planned and vetted and carefully created by lockstep scads of bureaucratic drones, work to buttress the agribusiness economy—while costing the State (or the corporation running the institution) as little as possible.
Here’s another way to look at it: in the 1930s, there were 5,000,000 more American farmers than there are now, not quite a hundred years later, and these millions of farmers grew a wider range of foodstuffs on these predominantly family-owned-and- operated farms. Most important, these farms don’t exist today. That cool six-figure loss hides the explosive growth of corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, shrouds the decrease in differing crops that
American farmers grow, and obfuscates how what we eat is making us sick because what we’re eating is in no small part dictated by the big businesses that grow the raw materials for our meals. We’ve gained cheap food (and the cheapest food goes to public schools and for-profit prisons), but we’ve lost everything else.
That said, the food here at Bedford Hills is better than at most prisons. We have a garden, and we’re surrounded with all manner of chipper do-gooders, prison education volunteers, religious types, prison reformers and assorted kindhearted saps who want to tell us that they believe in us, they really do. Still, the lionesses’ share of Bedford Hills’s three meals is white: white bread, white milk, white rice, white potatoes. The meat, such as it is, tends toward the stringy and inedible. It is not, as the common expression goes, “Grade D— Fit for Human Consumption,” but that is only because there is no Grade D meat. That’s a myth like the organ harvesters that sprung up in chain email in the ’90s: a horror that never existed created to take our minds off life’s real horrors, like the fact that the pesticides DuPont creates are in essence honeybee genocide. The USDA, for all its questionable wisdom, has eight rather serviceable categories for meat: Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner. Granted, while what we prisoners (and your public-school children) eat derives from the last four grades, there’s no Grade D, and the meat on our compartmentalized plate is, all things considered, edible, though not delectable.
That said, only the truly hard-up inmates rely on the three squares that Bedford Hills provides. There is a robust economy in prison comestibles that’s like stone soup meets Burning Man meets the night market of Yau Ma Tei. Your can of Goya chickpeas and box of Stove Top stuffing, my tin of chicken breast and can of green beans, someone else’s plastic jar of jerk marinade, and between the three of us, we can create something verging on tasty. Some of us, the very lucky ones, have Crock-Pots or rice cookers; we are the one-eyed gourmets in the kingdom of the confined.
To put it very plainly: I’m lucky because I’m rich. Before incarceration, I’d sold my apartment, cashed in my 401k and my life insurance, and liquidated all my assets, so my bank account showed a healthy seven figures. I came into prison with money; I’ll die in
prison with money. Even after the legal fees were settled, even after I paid out Casimir’s kin their wrongful death suit, I was left with lots of money (and the residuals on my published books have exploded; there’s nothing like notoriety to sell a book). I’m never going to go short at the commissary; I am well stocked with tinned everything, and my father and my siblings send me lavish care packages of the finest Uncle Ben’s and Dinty Moore that their money can buy. In the real world, I’d be comfortable, but in prison terms, I’m unimaginably rich. How much of my personal wealth can Cup O’Noodles consume —not much, even at exorbitant prison commissary prices.
Being a wealthy, smart psychopath with superb cooking skills and the best small appliance that the federal corrections system allows makes me a powerful person. If I were merely rich, I’d be a target.
But I’m not, and thus I am left more or less alone, except for when people want to barter, and this is fine with me. I live like an island, apart from, distant from, but also reachable from the mainland. I am Sardinia to their Italy, Corsica to their France, Staten Island to their New Jersey.
In prison terms, I eat well. On my terms, it’s wretched. Everything is relative, and, here in prison, nothing is beautiful, except memory.
From Cremona’s pastoral feedlots, I followed Marco to Florence, where he had kept an office after his business began to boom, and then to his kill yards in Fucecchio, a drab town about 50 kilometers away from Florence. As Newark is to New York City, Livorno is to Florence, and grotty little Fucecchio, a town with a long history in the smelly trade of leather tanning, sits halfway between the gritty port city of Livorno to the west and the stylish, historical city of Florence to the east. Fucecchio is where loads of lowing cattle, bundles of bleating sheep, and masses of spastic chickens meet their Maker, or, barring that pietistic construction, die in methods that Marco repeatedly assured me were the most humane possible.
Throughout the trip, Marco was the quintessence of politesse. He introduced me constantly as “Dorothea, la scrittrice per le riviste Americana,” the American magazine writer, and he made very certain never to touch me, never to act as if he knew my flesh and my heart, and never to indicate that I might be the slightest bit
attractive. Marco even made sure we had a chaperone! Driving from Cremona to Fucecchio, his majordomo, Silvio Chimichí, rode shotgun; I was stuffed like a child in the back seat. At every lunch and every dinner, Marco surrounded us with others, often in the pretense of helping me on my piece. We dined with agronomists, with bovine specialists, with his regional sales managers, with not one but two Italian food writers, with the regional head of the Italian Slow Food movement. I was fairly certain that if the trip were extended we’d soon be dining not on but with the cattle themselves.
Any hot body substituted for a bundling board; Marco inserted people between us like clean sheets. It was never for us to touch, not by accident, not by design, not—if Marco had his way about it— at all.
As Marco had aged, his hair thinned and he had cut it shorter and shorter. Outdoors, he tended toward jaunty hats, brushed-felt fedoras in the cold months and straw Panamas in the warm, which created a weatherproof dome for his yarmulke. Indoors, however, it was usually just Marco and his kippah, Italians being quite punctilious about hatless propriety. It was a marvel, watching him bend over, stand up, practically dance around, his yarmulke fixed and un-moving, but I discovered his secret: double-stick tape.
Marco’s head was like a starlet’s breasts, tethered to the performance of decorum with the help of space-age polymers.
The entirety of the time I spent with Marco, I hung on tenterhooks. Would he lose his resolve, succumb to history’s flesh memory, and fuck me like a frenzied bull? Or would he hold fast to his slippery monogamy, carry on the pretense, and keep his hands, his mouth, his cock, and his lust to himself? It was delightful, if excruciating, this constant proximity to Marco. For four days, the span of time I spent with him and his cattle, I shimmered with anticipation. A touch, a word, a brush of the lips, a knock at my hotel room door, some sign that Marco wanted me in his bed, naked and writhing: this was all I needed from him. I got niente.
And in a shocking show of exquisite self-control, I did nothing and said nothing in return. I, the provocatrix who had once given him a hand job to completion as he talked breathlessly on the phone to his wife and children, who’d induced him to fuck me while I stood
watching an opera at the Arena di Verona, who had perpetrated viciously pleasurable acts upon his body in multiple Michelin-starred restaurants’ bathrooms, did nothing. I met Marco’s cool, amiable façade, and I raised it to business class. No one watching my behavior would think for a moment that I’d had a history beyond casual emails with the man. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to; it was that I couldn’t run the risk of him getting spooked. If he didn’t fuck me, I’d have to kill him; to kill him, I needed him to trust me enough to be alone with me; for trust, I needed to play his game. This torture wasn’t without its piercing charms.
Touring his empire, Marco was incandescent with pride, and he was right to feel pleased with his work. The slaughterhouse was a thing of genius, a site that would make Temple Grandin beam. Marco moved only as many cattle as he needed from his feedlots in Cremona to his kill yard in Fucecchio, slaughtering cattle and lambs during the months from October to June, when it was cool enough that flies weren’t an issue. “Le mosche contaminano la carne,” he said with a knowing glance. The flies contaminate the meat.
Whatever that meant.
In the yard, a hundred or so cattle roamed free in two separate pens; one pen farther away from the kill floor allowed for food and water; the other, closer to the kill floor, provided only water. Sheep were held likewise, in smaller pens adjacent to the cattle; Marco told me there were no chickens to be slaughtered that day. Before slaughtering the cattle, Marco explained, he stopped feeding them, lowering the chance that an accidental slitting of intestines could harm the meat; otherwise the cattle were free to wander within their pens. So much work in the service of so many carcasses.
In the pen closer to the slaughterhouse, two distinct groups of men wandered among the cattle with clipboards, one clearly goyim, the other clearly Jewish. The Jewish ones, bearded and behatted, closely inspected a number of cattle, looking in their mouths, up their noses, under their tails, at their feet. When they found cattle that satisfied them, they sprayed a “K” on their hides. The goyim also inspected the cattle; a limping one was led away to a farther pen set apart from the others. “Dog food,” Marco said as we watched and his mouth made the downward arc of lost revenue.
Mirroring the two groups of men, the slaughterhouse split into two parts: one held the traditional chase, or chute, leading to the “knock box,” a close-fitting metal cradle that held the cow still for traditional slaughter; the other had a chase that led to an open room where three very serious bearded men and a large metal cow holder stood ready to slaughter with the kosher method of shechita. Inside the door to the conventional slaughtering room was a quote from Temple Grandin, “Nature is cruel but we don’t have to be”; inside the door of the kosher side was something written in Hebrew. Marco told me it was the prayer that the shochet, the men trained in kosher slaughter, say before they begin their workday.
In the decades since our college time in Siena, Marco had grown not merely to accept his heritage, not merely to embrace it, but to believe in it. “It’s a mitzvah,” Marco said of his trade, in Italian sprinkled with Hebrew, smiling and gesturing at the three bearded men bent over their shiny line of long rectangular knives, running them repeatedly against their fingernails, like obsessive compulsives. “The shochet pays respect to the animal. He releases its deepest unconscious wish—to be our food, with grace, with respect, with humility.” Marco was beatific. “In confronting face to face the animal as we kill it, we assume the moral responsibility for taking the animal’s life. It is a holy act of sanctification, not this— what do you call it, genocide of cows. No hamburger should cost less than four euros. I spit on McDonald’s.” He said the name of the burger empire with a strange English inflection, MACK-dawh-ahldz.
On one side of the divide, the traditional kill floor, a cow entered the box, a man pointed a pneumatic stunner at its forehead, the cow dropped, and the cow slid out the side like a piece of toast. Then, insensate, it was unceremoniously hoisted by its hind leg, where its throat was cut, releasing a geyser of blood. On the other side, the kosher side, the cow was given a drink of water and then guided into the big metal cow tipper, which rotated to suspend the cow upside down in its full metal jacket. One technician—not, Marco told me, a shochet—used a rod to hold down the cow’s chin, another sprayed water over the cow’s exposed throat, and in one perfect, swift slice, the shochet slit the cow’s throat. Different, more elegant process; same geyser of blood. The metal jacket turned upright, depositing
the dead cow on the floor, where, like its goy-feeding brethren, it was lifted unceremoniously by a hind leg. From 1,200 pounds of living creature to so much comestible meat, leather, pet food, beauty products, fertilizer, wallpaper, tennis racquet strings, biodiesel, fireworks, shampoo, refined sugar, air filters, and fabric softeners.
For us it may be ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but for cattle it’s so much more kaleidoscopic.
There’s no good way to turn animals into meat. Statistically, traditional stunning and shochet killing fail at about the same rate, roughly ten percent of the time. No matter what measures you take, you’re killing an animal to harvest its glorious muscles. Death is rarely pretty. Indeed, death’s very predilection to go horribly awry gave Marco the genius idea to start the organic conventional side of his business. When his team of expert shochets slipped up, when their knives were nicked, when they cut too close or too shallow, when the trimmers perforated the stomach, when the cow’s lungs weren’t smooth, whenever something, somehow, somewhere rendered that cow not kosher, Marco had an immediate plan B: feed the goyim. It was brilliant, really. Same cattle, two audiences, and both awash in the clean penny smell of fresh exsanguination.
The processing floor was similarly twinned. On the conventional side, a long line of men in white coats, tall rubber boots, netted heads, and paper arm condoms systematically turned dead cows into slabs of meat and tubs of glistening viscera. On the kosher side, the same thing happened with many, many more steps. The cow was not merely disassembled; it was scrutinized, parts turned inside out, upside down, blown up, and pored over. Any tiny imperfection rendered it unacceptable, and swiftly, like a plague victim, it would be whisked away to the other side of the divide. If acceptable, the cow’s carcass was hung on hooks from a conveyor belt, the meat was salted and washed and washed and salted. It was bathed with a languorous precision, like the limbs of a courtesan before an assignation. At the end lay twin refrigerated rooms where rows of dismembered cattle hung, red and fulsome as ripe passionfruit.
I had to commend Marco for the simple, automated vision in recognizing that he would do much more than double his business by expanding it; he would make meat his keening bitch. Marco’s
empire was death, and in complete, abject, honest regard, he did it ingeniously. So much mechanized precision in the interest of beneficent death made me inexpressibly hot. I wanted Marco. I wanted to fuck him hard on that kill-yard floor. And I couldn’t show it.
Not a sigh, not a glance, not a whimper, not if I wanted him dead.
