Free Cleaving by Julie Powell Page B

trying to keep it warm, help it breathe. The creature would turn briefly green again, would seem to get better, but it couldn't
     last more than a few seconds without Mom's warm breath on it. I remember that moment more vividly than almost any other moment
     in my childhood. Our entire family gathered, crying, trying to summon enough breath to keep this animal alive. That's what
     my heart feels like. Like a goddamned lizard, upon whom entirely ineffective CPR is being performed.
    At first I think I've been the one to do the ripping. I've made a decision. Painful, but clean. And there is a little consolation
     in the action of it. It takes me a while of picking off the bloody bits that remain to realize that I'm not the tearer, but
     the thing that's been torn away. And I pick and I pick and I pick at these connecting shreds that cling to me. They catch
     in my craw unexpectedly. A trip to the dentist can do it. (Always obsessed with his teeth, D, a winking Woody Allenish mannerism
     that irritated and amused me in equal measure.) A store window. (Zales. A kiss we once shared on the sidewalk in front of
     the store, impassioned enough to inspire the salesman inside to come out and encourage us to do a bit of impulse shopping.)
     A once-admired sweater or lingerie set. (Snapping on my bra in the morning, I flash on his eyes as he stands behind me in
     a hotel bathroom, his hands on my hips, eyeing me in the mirror: "That just hits you in all the right places, doesn't it?")
Team America,
of course. So what I thought at first would be clean and final is endlessly prolonged. The city is his body now, all those
     corners and bars and restaurants and uninspired blocks that inspire such specific wants in me. He's been part of my muscle
     and bone, one of the joints that I cling to, for two years--give or take a decade--and now he's gone. And I text and write and
     make phone calls that go unanswered. I pick and I pick and I pick.
    There's no such thing as perfectly clean. Not really.

4
Stuffing Sausage

    W HEN MY BROTHER and I were both in high school--this would be my senior year, his freshman--someone in the family obtained one of those Magnetic
     Poetry boxes. You know, those Lucite boxes with all the tiny refrigerator magnets with words printed on them, which you can
     put together in different ways. My brother, who never showed much inclination toward writing in any other context, turned
     out to be the Refrigerator Magnet Poetry King. Over the next several years, every time I came home from college, I would immediately
     read the refrigerator for new masterpieces. (To this day they remain, in the garage, where our old refrigerator was banished
     to when Mom bought her sexier stainless-steel model.) His lines could be witty and pithy and absurd (
Who put the knife in bed, man?
is one of my favorites), but perhaps his best one was this:
    I wanted a life of
    Blue skies shining
    Diamonds and lusty
    Spring shadows.
    I have an apparatus
    To produce sausage
    J UAN IS teaching me how to make the Italian sweets. We're together in the small room at the back of the shop, hardly more than a
     pantry-cum-broom-closet, that is Juan's domain. The meat grinder, a stainless-steel contraption about five feet tall, dominates
     the room. The meat goes into the big bin on top, the bottom of which slants toward one end. Inside that is a hole not unlike
     a sink disposal, which houses the grinding apparatus. Below, on one side of the machine, is an opening over which Juan has
     fitted a metal plate dotted with holes, like a large shower drain. He and I are both standing on coolers on either side of
     the receptacle, up to our elbows in meat. Meat and ice. The meat is in chunks, perhaps five inches long by three inches wide,
     emptied from huge Cryovac bags marked "Pork Trim" that we toted in from the cooler. The ice is from a machine pushed into
     a corner of the kitchen. I'm not sure what the reason is for the ice, but it must be mixed in