CHOP!
Sarah's Big Day
By
Edward Hyde


It was Sarah’s big day and she could not be more excited! Although the concept of “birthdays” was something that had never been discussed with her, just a word overheard from customers sometimes when they came to select a piggy for their dinner, usually talked about with a tone of excitement, she knew all about Anniversaries and what they meant. Today was her fourth Anniversary, four years to the day since she was born, and that meant only one thing – time for the chop! In a few minutes, she would line up with her remaining litter-sisters and take her turn kneeling on the straw, resting her neck on the wooden block, then all the others who were still waiting for their special day to come would gather to watch, counting down from five, shouting “CHOP!” upon reaching zero then cheering as the farmer brought down his axe and cut the piggy’s cute little head off. No matter how many times they witnessed and participated in this ritual, which could be as often as several times a day in busy seasons, it was still the most fun thing they knew and made them all yearn for their own moment in the spotlight.

Of course, not all piggies even made it to their fourth Anniversary, with many purchased by hungry families or restaurants beforehand or used to fill special orders and every day on the farm carried the excitement for all but the tiniest of piggies, not yet eligible for harvest, that today could be their big day, but there was certainty that any who reached their fourth Anniversary would be harvested on that day, so Sarah had spent the past few weeks growing ever more excited, confident that she would get the chop that day if not before. Now the day was here!

It had been the more than three centuries since Sidney Roebuck had changed the world and opened people’s eyes, not to mention their stomachs, to the delights of girl-meat! Despite some opposition at first and one global blip in the early decades, the custom had gained popularity steadily ever since, becoming so much an established part of western culture that hardly anyone thought to even question it, with school, churches and other public institutions serving Girl and sometimes even Boy at social events, although there was never any real doubt in most peoples’ minds that Girl was the superior meat. It was normal, to the point of causing confusion and consternation if it did not happen, for the bridesmaids to provide the centre-piece of any wedding feast and family or neighbourhood cookouts were common-place. Public parks and beaches also set up rentable barbecue pits for public use and, of course, restaurants and chains such as Sidney’s, La Fille, Jessie T’s, MAXX, Wendigo, Gingerbread and Gretel’s were staple establishments in every town. There were also butchers who either specialised in girl-meat or included it among their other offerings and various abattoirs with custom facilities specifically for processing human volunteers.

The popularity of human meat in general, specifically Girl, however, led to its own problems. As it became more popular and accepted, the demand rose, with supermarkets beginning to offer it on their shelves, both fresh and frozen, long-established fast food chains switching their primary ingredient to compete with the newer, specialist outlets and the public appetite for affordable girl-meat growing exponentially year on year.

Not that there was any shortage of volunteers, of course. That was not the issue. Nor was the eating of children, for it was still mostly children and young teens who ended up on the menu, creating any kind of threat to the global population. In fact, it played an important role in keeping it stable! Although nobody had been able to prove a definitive causal link, the acceptance of cannibalism and its rise as a practice had definitely coincided with a gradual increase in average life expectancy, when correcting for those who voluntarily gave up their lives at a relatively early age to provide meat for others. The first signs had been noticeable in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with the average western life expectancy steadily creeping up from seventy to ninety, with people at the upper end of that spectrum generally presenting as twenty years younger than their counterparts of earlier generations. This trend had continued to the point where, although people still reached maturity at the same rate they always had, most people now enjoyed a fifty to sixty year “plateau” from their mid-twenties onwards during which they only aged very gradually, only hitting anything approaching “middle age” in their eighties or nineties and then continuing to age much as they had at the start of their life, with one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty being considered a typical lifespan with some even achieving a double-century!

The upshot of this increased lifespan and extended youth had been that couples, rather than typically have one batch of children, perhaps two or three, spaced two to four years apart, now often had several batches, starting again with babies once their first or even second brood were grown up and moved out. This meant that eating some of those children, even all the siblings from one family at a time, did not mean the end of that family lineage and any heirs and other offspring could be easily replaced. If this phenomenon was not, as was widely believed, a side-effect of cannibalism and was simply the next stage of human evolution then this increased birthrate and longevity could have been utterly catastrophic for the planet. As it was, the global population was kept in relative check, without the need for culling or other such controversial measures, by the sheer number of young people who wanted to offer their lovely young bodies as food!

No, the issue was not with the number of volunteers, but with how they were willing to be prepared. Certainly, there were those who craved the utter dehumanisation of being butchered but even these preferred to allow smaller, artisan butchers to sell their meat. Being selected for a restaurant like La Fille was, of course, the highest honour but Sidney’s and the other mid-price chains still carried a degree of prestige and of course a lot of girls loved the attention that came with being cooked at a family gathering or other party. In short, hardly anyone wanted to be turned into burgers or sold in frozen, breaded strips at the supermarket when there was the possibility of being oven or spit-roasted!

For a while, various incentives had been offered but this was unsustainable since it ultimately resulted in the wholesale price of cheap meat being higher than that which was considered premium. Some countries toyed with the idea of the state claiming all deceased bodies for disposal with those that were young enough and in a good enough condition when collected stripped of their usable meat before cremation but this had proved logistically non-viable, nor was the amount of meat collected that was deemed fit for human consumption by the time it reached the processing centre enough to justify the expense and the scheme was quietly dropped. Eventually, governments had turned to science to solve the problem.

Improvements in genetic manipulation and cloning technology had led to the point where it was possible to create a custom-made human embryo that would be viable after only one month and, once born, would grow at between three and four times the rate of a normal child. There had been some public resistance to this “manufactured” meat, as well as ethical concerns raised around consent, but the teams of researchers had worked hard to counter all of these. Rather than being clones of specific individuals, resulting in multiple replicas of the same person, they found a way to create randomised combinations of any two genomes from a vast pool for each embryo, meaning that each girl created this way was as unique as any natural-born human, although from a very specific and tightly-controlled gene pool.

In an almost unprecedented example of international cooperation, the researchers from the various reams around the world put out an appeal for girls who believed their meat to be of the highest quality to come forward and allow their genetic material to be collected, after which each volunteer was slaughtered and their meat entered into blind taste-tests for panels made up both of industry experts and professionals and randomly selected members of the public who were chosen from a draw that all had been invited to enter. Finally, the samples were narrowed down to what was declared to be the world’s hundred most delicious girls whose genomes would be used in perpetuity to create the clones.

With some further tweaks to the genetic code, the lab-created girls were left with limited capacity for intelligence, never able to mature mentally beyond the equivalent of a natural three year old, vastly reduced sensitivity to pain, only experiencing the sensation to the degree required to avoid significant injury, and with no concept of fear so they would spend their entire, short lives in ignorant happiness, raised to understand that the purpose of their existence was to be food, and to celebrate the fact.

The final issue to overcome was one of logistics. If these cloned meat-girls were to be produced in the quantity required, then the number of women who would need to be employed to carry them would be beyond impractical. To get around this, the scientists engineered sows, actual pigs, that would be capable of carrying these basically human infants to term and feeding them for their first week or so on her milk before being impregnated with the next batch of up to a dozen at a time.

While technically the meat from these genetically manipulated, artificially conceived girls was equivalent to if not better than that of a natural volunteer, their genes having been specially selected to be the most delicious and their shorter maturation times and strictly-controlled upbringing offering less opportunity for illness or injury, there was still a perception among the public that the meat of “farm piggies” was of a lower grade and some companies, such as the Sidney’s restaurant chain, SB Catering, the rapidly-expanding Fantasy Feasts franchise, not to mention various independent eateries and auction houses prided themselves on selling only “Home Raised” meat. Still, none of this was any concern to the farm piggies like Sarah who saw their only purpose in life as making people happy with their meat.

At first, the only farms had been huge, industrial complexes, often with their own abattoirs attached, raising and slaughtering tens of thousands of meat-girls every year but, as the technology had become more established and affordable, smaller, family-run, free-range farms like the one Sarah had spent her whole life on had sprung up where the piggies spent most of their time playing in the fields, sleeping in warm, comfortable barns, slaughtered and butchered by hand when their time came and the majority of their meat sold in the small farm-shop easy accessible to the public from the main road, although they also supplied some local restaurants and cafes and sold live piggies for home-cooking upon request with the families able to wander among the happy, frolicking, naked girls and pick the one they wanted.

Some customers, of course, wanted to pick their own but to also have her killed and her carcass cleaned by the professionals before taking her home, a state the staff and piggies alike referred to as “Oven-Ready”.

Since the farm-piggies were not considered people, they did not have birthdays but, on little farms like Sarah’s, at least, they were aware of their Anniversaries, knowing that any piggy who reached their fourth without being harvested would automatically get the chop so that their meat could be sold in the shop. Since every single one of them craved being eaten, the only thing they feared or which made them cry being the idea that something might happen to make their meat unusable, in which case they would be “burned up”, humanely euthanised and their body incinerated in the farm’s furnace, the “Fourth Anniversary Chop” provided consolation so that they all knew their time would come and they would not have to wait forever.

Breathing in the fresh, countryside air of the warm April morning, the warm sunshine caressing her body and the lush, green grass tickling between her toes, Sarah listened for the bell which would mean her time had come. Neither she nor any of her remaining litter-sisters had been allowed their normal breakfast of porridge that morning but she knew why and didn’t mind. Smiling contentedly, she looked over at the tree where dozens of heads in various stages of decomposition hung by the hair like baubles of a Christmas tree, swaying gently and occasionally bumping into each other, with many more whole and broken skulls on the ground beneath. Very soon, hers would be hanging there for the younger piggies to enjoy.

Sarah was not her actual name, of course. None of the piggies had legal names, just legal designations that were a mix of numbers and letters, but the workers tended to give them all nick-names based on their looks and personalities or sometimes based around their codes. Sarah’s was FUK27-S8-RA-4 – FUK27 being the farm’s official number as the twenty-seventh farm to be registered in the UK, S8 referred to her litter, RA the sow she was born from, one of only two on the farm known to the piggies as “Mummy” and “Mama” but legally designated “Reproducer A” and “Reproducer B” and finally 4 marked her as the fourth born of her litter. The worker who had assigned her this code and stamped it indelibly on her arm and rump had thought it read a little like “Sarah” and so that was what she had been called ever since.

From the little hill she stood on, Sarah could see the shop where her meat would be sold and the car park beyond it. She knew nothing of the world beyond but knew enough to understand that the familiar cars were the ones the workers arrived in and more cars in the car park, ones she did not recognise, meant people coming to buy some yummy meat. She hoped there would be lots of visitors that day and her meat would sell quickly! Sometimes, some of the older piggies like her were allowed to help in the shop, although not on the tills of course because they could not count very well and, although they understood that the colourful pieces of paper or shiny metal discs were precious and could be swapped for meat, they had no idea what each individual one was worth or why some people seemed to be allowed to take meat without handing over any shiny discs or colourful paper, just tapping a card on the machine that went beep, and it always made her excited to see how happy the people looked to be taking her sisters’ meat home for their dinner!

Of the ten piggies that had been born in her litter, she was one of only three left. As was normal, four had been harvested just as they started to walk at about eight weeks old so that they could be sold whole as “Chickens” in the shop, one had been sold to a restaurant just after their third anniversary and the other two had been bought and taken home by nice families, one alive and the other oven-ready. Sarah’s meat, she knew, would be chopped up into handy pieces just right for one family meal.

The bell began to ring and she excitedly ran down the hill towards the barn where all the other piggies were gathered excitedly, ready to count her down and watch her head cut off. Even the tiny ones from the nursery who were too small to play out in the field were brought through by the workers to watch the show. Sarah looked around for her litter-sisters, Sunshine and Smiler, who would also be getting the chop and, when they found each other, the cute blonde piggies held hands and danced in a circle, the final minutes of their lives also their happiest. They were even happier when they saw that it was Ed, their favourite worker, stood by the chopping block and holding the axe while the pretty lady butcher whose name was Helen and her assistant, a young man with glasses whose name they didn’t know, stood by with her knives and cleaver ready to part them out for the shop.

As the first-born of their whole litter, not just among the survivors, it was Smiler’s right to go first. With Sarah and Sunshine stood to one side and all the other piggies lined up along the side wall of the barn to cheer her on, the meaty but toned piggy who a stranger would have taken to be between eight and ten years old knelt down in the straw, crossed one leg over the other and gripped her wrists behind her back the way they were all taught and laid her neck on the block. Ed leaned down and carefully moved her ponytail out of the way and gave her golden hair a loving stroke then raised the axe.

“Ready, everyone?” he grinned. The dozens of naked girls, from toddlers to those who looked the same age as the kneeling girl, counted down from five. In unison, they all cried “CHOP!” and the axe came down, severing Smiler’s head cleanly from her body. In fell onto the straw, rolled a little then was still. A cheer went up from the watching piggies as her body was hung up to drain then it was Sunshine’s turn. Less than a minute later, her headless carcass hung next to Smiler’s and it was finally Sarah’s big moment.

In between each chop, Ed gave the block a blast of water from the hose to clean off most of the blood. The reddish-brown staining ran deep, of course, but at least it meant that the next Piggy did not have to rest her neck in cool, congealing slime. As she knelt down, Sarah felt the strong tingle between her legs that she always felt when thinking about her harvest, or watching other piggies get the chop. She had told Ed about it once, soon after she had leaned to talk, and he had shown her how to rub down there to make it feel better. It was something she could do herself, and the other, older piggies had taught her the best way, but she had always liked it best when Ed or one of the other workers did it for her. Maybe it was because their fingers were bigger? Or rougher from the work they did? Either way, she would always try to seek him out, when he wasn’t too busy with other work, of course, and ask for his help and he had always seemed more than happy to oblige.

She wished that he could do that one more time for her. He had last night, when all the piggies were safely tucked up in their bunks, under their cosy blankets, he had come and sat on the edge of her mattress, saying he needed to give her a final inspection ready for the morning. She had very much enjoyed the feeling of his hands all over her meaty young body, especially when he had squeezed her rump or pinched her perky pink nipples, but it was his thorough inspection of her plump fillet that she had really enjoyed and, afterwards, he had let her taste her own honey from his fingers so she could see how delicious she was!

Still, Sarah was a good, obedient piggy and knew that this was not the time for the sort of game. Smiler’s body had already been gutted and cleaned and Helen was chopping it in half with her cleaver, having cut out her fillet first, of course, and the young man was opening up Sunshine’s belly. They would be ready for her soon and she should not keep them waiting!

The block was soggy, of course, but she did not mind that. She rather liked the way the smells of blood, straw and wet wood mixed together. It was comforting, cosy. A happy smell. Feeling the same kind of nervous excitement a natural child feels when riding a roller-coaster, her innocent little heart beating fast, Sarah crossed her feet over and clasped her wrists then laid her neck on the block. Instead of just leaning over to adjust her hair as he had done with the others, however, Ed knelt down beside her, stroked her hair lovingly and whispered softly to her.

“Excited, Sarah?” She gave a little nod, as much as she could manage in her current position, her sweet, genuine smile providing the best answer. “Good!” He smiled warmly. “You know you were always my favourite, right?” Hearing these words gave her a warm feeling in her tummy. “The boss says I can have your fillet for my lunch today, does that sound good? I get to take some rump home for dinner too!” He stroked her lovely meaty behind for a few moments before giving it a playful slap which made her giggle. “Hope that’s okay with you?”

“Oh yes!” she gushed in a quiet voice, not wanting to make the other piggies who would have to wait their turn for the chop jealous. “I hope I’m yummy for you!”

“Oh I know you will be!” he assured her, giving her a gentle kiss on the top of her head then standing up and picking up the axe. Sarah felt a warm glow of happiness as she waited for the blade to fall. Not only was her dream about to come true but her favourite worker was going to enjoy the best parts of her meat! She wondered who his new favourite would be when she was gone? Perhaps one of the tiny piglets sitting on other workers laps that he could get to know over the Summer?

“Ready, everyone?” She heard Ed ask, although his voice sounded far away. She wasn’t really concentrating on what was going on around her. She was thinking of how much Ed was going to enjoy her fillet at lunch time. Perhaps, she thought, he would have it on toast with a friend egg, sprinkled with cheese and black pepper? Maybe some mushrooms too if they had some in the fridge? Then at home he would cook up a delicious piece of her rump. She didn’t know where workers lived when they weren’t at the farm. She didn’t think it could be in the cars they came in so she rather imagined a cross between a barn and the shop. Did other people live there with him? She wondered. She knew some of the other workers lived together. Did he have other piggies at home? Those ones who wore clothes and came to the chop or to help the adults choose from her sisters for their dinner? She hoped he’d be allowed to take enough of her home so that everyone got full, happy tummies! And the rest of her, sold in the shop, making lots of people happy while her head swayed calmly in the tree, the birdies coming to peck at it until it fell off and joined the pile underneath.

Sunshine’s carcass was being cleaned out with the hose now and Helen had taken down one half of Smiler’s and started chopping it up. In just a few minutes, that would be her. The heads of her litter-sisters were in a bucket, ready to be taken out to the tree. She couldn’t see Smiler’s as it was on the bottom but Sunshine’s seemed to be peeping over the rim as if she were playing hide-and-seek. This made Sarah giggle and she hoped there would be room in the bucket for her too, or perhaps Ed could just carry her by the hair.

“Five!” She heard everyone shout and decided to count along with them. “Four!” She joined in, just as enthusiastically as the audience. “Three!” The tingle grew even more powerful. This was not something to look forward to that would happen some day any more, this was real, just moments away, and felt amazing! “Two!” Mummy was due to drop a little any time now, and Mama was well on her way. Would her name be given to one of the new piglets? She hoped so! “One!” This was it! Her big moment had finally come!

To be continued...