Customers.

That’s what most people called them—the men and women who came in everyday,dull eyed and banal, blinking under fluorescent lights as if the chill of the counter was the only thing keeping them awake. But not him.

He didn’t call them customers. He called them grazers.

Because that’s what they were.

Docile, oblivious, shuffling through life like cattle. They weren’t hunters. They didn’t fight, didn’t kill, didn’t even think about where their meat came from. They didn’t see the bone and sinew, the spray of blood, the way a blade danced through tissue like a conductor’s baton through air. They didn’t want to know.

No one ever wants to know.

They just wanted clean, shrink-wrapped packages. Striploins and sausages, thighs and chops—all neat, all sanitized, all packaged violence with a smiling label. A performance for the undeserving. The labor of others served to them with a bow.

And that’s why they needed his art.

To wake them up. To snap them out of their little grey lives. To show them something real.

His work was honest in a way their lives could never be. Every incision a truth. Every red-slicked surface a reflection of what they were underneath the makeup, the pleasantries, the digital noise.

He wasn’t a monster.

He was a revelation.

And one day—soon—they would see it.

They would understand.

Or maybe they wouldn’t understand.

In fact, he knew they wouldn’t.

The vast majority of them—the grazers—lived behind walls. Minds shuttered tight like storm shelters. Ideas locked away behind rusted doors forged from fear and morality—that brittle illusion they all clung to like driftwood in a sea of instinct.

They built their barricades from the stories they told themselves:

“I’m a good person.” 

“I could never hurt someone.”

“Violence is wrong.”

Lies. Every last one of them.

They wore their restraint like a badge. Their civility like armor. But what they called morality was just the fear of consequence dressed up as virtue.

Remove that fear, strip away the polite fiction—and what was left?

A trembling animal, afraid to look at the world as it truly was.

Weak. Fragile. Pretending.

But not him.

He had peeled those illusions away like fat from a side of meat. Cut them out. Scraped them clean. That’s why he could see so clearly. That’s why he could make art with blood and sinew while they choked on the truth behind shrink wrap and supermarket labels.

They didn’t have to understand.

They just had to see.

Cold, pale blue eyes drifted toward the old clock mounted high above the counter where he worked. Its ticking was faint beneath the hum of fluorescent lights and the soft thud of tools at work, but he heard it—he always did. The rhythmic tick tick tick felt almost like a second heartbeat, one not entirely his own, but one he cherished all the same.

Only a few more hours now. Just a handful of ticks left before he could be done playing this part, this charade—feeding the sheep.

They called it honest work, respectable. A trade. Something good and grounded, something you could shake a hand over at a church fundraiser.

But what did they know?

The clock ticked again.

Not long now. The mask would come off soon enough. And the real work would begin.

They didn’t see the work for what it truly was. Didn’t see the effort, only the results. They didn’t understand the precision, the patience, the quiet skill it took. All they saw was meat in a tray, wrapped in plastic, priced by the pound. They didn’t care about the process—only that it fed them, satisfied them, allowed them to forget the ugly truths behind every bite.

Destruction dressed up as convenience.

But he knew the truth. He had learned it early.

His father had taught him—out there in the barn on their patch of farmland in rural Ontario. Taught him the real kind of work. Good, honest work, his father had called it, as he strung up the hog with practiced ease, the animal’s body dangling from a hook while its blood drained into an old wooden tub below. It was a hog the boy had raised himself through the 4-H club, one he had bottle-fed as a piglet, one whose ears he had scratched and named Charlie.

He had known that animal.

And he had cut its throat all the same.

The child he had been—no older than ten—stood in his too-large coveralls and hand-me-down rubber boots, still holding the knife as the warm blood spattered against his clothes. The red mist clung to him like a blessing.

And then, something inside him changed.

As the pig twitched one last time and the light dimmed from its dull, black eyes, he didn’t cry. He didn’t flinch. He smiled.

Because in that moment—watching the drip, drip, drip of crimson into wood, hearing the creak of the rope, and feeling the stillness settle in—he saw something no one else had ever shown him.

Beauty.

Not the kind found in sunsets or flowers or paintings. No, this was something purer. A beauty he had created, nurtured, and then delivered. The boy who killed Charlie had understood something his teachers never would.

Life is not sacred. Creation is only half the art. Destruction finishes the masterpiece.

Father though—Father never saw it.

He was a good man, some would say. A patient man. He worked the land and raised animals the way his father had, and his father before that. No soulless concrete bunkers or industrial-sized meat grinders for him. No conveyor belts and bolt guns and sterile, assembly-line death. No.

Their farm was artisanal, though Father never would’ve called it that. He just said it was “the right way.”

Hogs had space to roam. Chickens pecked freely in the yard. The animals were raised slow, fed well, and when the time came, killed by hand—quick, clean, respectful.

He meant it, too.

But that’s where the divide opened.

Father did it because it was necessary. Because death was the price of survival. He spoke of cycles and nature, of respect for the animal and the land. Never waste. Never cruelty. Just the way of things.

But for him—for the boy who had once watched the light vanish from Charlie’s eyes—it was never about necessity.

It was about beauty.

About truth.

Because when you looked what you killed in the eyes… when your hand brought down the hammer, or the axe, or when your blade glided across the soft throat of something still warm with breath—that was when the veil slipped. That was when you saw life stripped bare of its illusions. No sanctity. No poetry. Just blood.

And the blood…

The blood was the best part.

The red water of life, pumping and pulsing, leaking from its container, soaking the dirt and feeding the soil. It didn’t matter if it gushed or trickled—it flowed. A river of truth in a world of lies.

He still remembered watching it pool beneath the tub, slow and thick and steaming in the morning cold. Remembered how the sight of it made his breath catch. How his pulse quickened, how his body warmed with the thrill of it.

Even now, years later, it didn’t take much. A scratch. A shaving nick on some stranger’s throat. That little line of red would shimmer, and for a moment, everything else would fall away.

Because blood wasn’t just mess.

Blood was essence.

It was soul, made visible.

And he—unlike Father—had never stopped chasing that glimpse of divinity.

***

Martha grunted as she hoisted herself up another rocky ledge, her limbs moving with the kind of practiced ease that only came from a lifetime of loving motion. She glanced down the cliff face, her dark hair tousled by the breeze, and spotted Coraline a few meters below—trailing, but not struggling. Not really. Coraline liked to pretend she wasn’t keeping up, even though Martha knew better.

Coraline could scale this incline like a cat burglar. She just chose not to. It was part of the game—downplaying the incredible physical conditioning she’d quietly maintained under the guise of a well-dressed lawyer’s life. Still, even if she didn’t admit it, there was no faking the control in her movements, the sure way her hands found holds, the quiet precision of every shift in weight.

Martha paused, anchoring herself with one leg hooked around a protruding rock as she called down, smirking, “You okay down there, Cora?”

Coraline huffed in reply, flicking a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “I’m fine. Just enjoying the view.”

Martha raised an eyebrow. “Of what—my ass?”

Coraline didn’t answer, and that was enough to make Martha snort with amusement.

“Still not gay or bi, Cora,” she called back with a teasing lilt, “but I’ll take the compliment. I do put work into this ass.”

Coraline bit back a grin as she climbed another few feet. “Don’t flatter yourself. I was admiring the geology.”

Martha laughed again, loud and genuine, her voice echoing off the cliffside like a birdcall. “Sure, sure. Rocks are sexy too, I get it.”

Coraline rolled her eyes and kept climbing—but her smile lingered. The banter, the climb, the fresh air—this was the kind of reprieve she needed. For a little while, the world wasn’t courtrooms, corruption, and crime scenes. It was just two old friends, a cliff face, and a sky wide enough to forget everything else beneath it.

The two women reached the top and pulled themselves over the final lip of the cliff, dust and grit clinging to their palms. They settled down side by side on a flat stretch of rock, catching their breath as they took in the view.

Below them stretched the Niagara Valley in all its spring glory—an expanse of green fields and treetops threaded with winding roads and scattered rooftops. Above, the sky was a brilliant blue, painted with a few lazy clouds like brushstrokes an absent-minded artist had dabbed in to break the cerulean monotony.

Martha pulled a pair of water bottles from her pack and handed one to Coraline. Neither spoke for a moment as they sipped, letting the wind cool their skin and the silence settle around them like a blanket.

It was Martha who broke the stillness first.

“You know,” she said, nodding toward the valley, “I could tell you how much of that land belongs to the Vanhorn family.”

Coraline took another long drink before answering, “I’d hazard a guess and say… most of it.”

Martha let out one of her signature snort-laughs, the kind that always sounded like it came from her real self—not the polished debutante her family expected her to be, but the girl who once used to steal snacks from the manor kitchen and drag Coraline out on midnight adventures when she slept over.

“You’re not wrong,” Martha said, smirking. “Dad used to show us. Maps, deeds. Took us on Sunday drives when we were kids.”

She raised her left hand and swept it dramatically across the horizon, dropping into a pitch-perfect imitation of her father’s pompous cadence: “This is all ours. The Vanhorns earned it with blood, sweat, and tears. We came from nothing—just a poor Dutch family of farmers and vintners. This is our legacy. Everything we have, we earned.”

Coraline turned to glance at her, but didn’t interrupt. She could see the tension in Martha’s shoulders, the way her jaw tensed beneath the theatrics.

Then Martha relaxed and let her hand fall. Her voice dropped out of the performance and back into something more honest. “What he never said—but I always thought—was this: No, our ancestors earned it. They worked the land. They built the vineyards. They made this place theirs.”

She paused, eyes on the far fields below.

“You, my brothers, me—none of us did a damn thing. We just inherited it. We maintain it like we’re curators in some museum of wealth we didn’t earn.”

Coraline didn’t argue.

Because that was the kind of truth you didn’t correct.

“To be fair, the Penroses aren’t much better,” Coraline replied, her voice even but sincere.

And she meant it. Her family might not have been entrenched in the same centuries-old aristocracy as the Vanhorns, but they weren’t far off. The Penroses were a hybrid—old money tempered with newer ambition. The name carried weight, and with it came comfort, privilege, and legacy… all built on the backs of people who’d put in the real work long before Coraline was ever born.

Martha scoffed. “Yeah, except your father actually did something. Law school, hard cases, built his own name—hell, one of the best firms in Ontario carries it in big silver letters on the wall. That wasn’t handed to him. He earned it.”

She picked absently at a thread on the hem of her shorts, her voice growing more bitter.

“My dad studied business and economics—not to forge his own way, but to grow the seeds someone else planted. He didn’t build anything. He just… optimized it. That’s the Vanhorn legacy: management by inheritance.”

Coraline was quiet for a beat, taking another slow sip of water as she let Martha’s words settle in the open air between them. Then she said gently, “It’s not the worst thing in the world, Martha. To maintain and protect what someone else built.”

Martha turned her head slightly, frowning—not at Coraline, but at the idea itself.

Coraline continued, voice softer now, not as a lecture but as a truth. “It means you respect where you come from. That you understand it’s not always about starting something new. Sometimes it’s about making sure what matters doesn’t disappear.”

Martha didn't reply right away. Her eyes drifted back down the valley, toward the patchwork of green fields and old roads threading through land her family had claimed for generations.

Maybe Coraline was right.

Maybe keeping something alive was a different kind of building.

But damn if it didn’t feel like a cage sometimes.

Martha opened her mouth, clearly about to say something more, but Coraline smirked and cut her off before she could get the words out.

“And don’t even get me started on family legacy,” Coraline said, her tone drier than the valley breeze. “Or I’ll remind you about the British side of the Penroses—who’ve been around since the High Middle Ages. Actual nobles. Knights. Barons. A full-on duke, Martha.”

Martha clamped her mouth shut mid-thought, her eyes narrowing as the full weight of that point landed. It dawned on her that if she wanted to play the who’s-more-oppressed-by-their-legacy game, maybe a Penrose wasn’t the best person to try to beat.

Coraline watched the realization flicker behind her friend’s eyes, then sipped her water with an infuriatingly smug tilt of the chin.

Martha groaned dramatically and shifted tone, adopting a laughably poor British accent. “Oh, I do forget. M’lady is a propa’ one, innit? Shall we drink our water with our pinkies raised—fer the Queen Mum and all?”

Coraline lifted an eyebrow and didn’t miss a beat. She extended her pinky with exaggerated grace, raising her bottle in a mock-toast. “Let’s shall, my dear,” she replied, her accent just as ridiculous but twice as smug.

They both burst out laughing, the sound echoing across the rocky ridge like something bright and human. It cut through the lingering heaviness of talk about legacy and expectations and the weight of names, replacing it—if only for a moment—with the warmth of friendship and shared silliness.

For a little while longer, the world could wait.