Blood bespeckles the carcasses laid in neat rows across the stainless steel surfaces. Beside them, behind rusty iron bars, future victims look on. The cages are barely a foot high--just enough to live in, but not enough room to raise one's head and plead for clemency, for a momentary reprieve. One cage happens to be level with the block, and a young fellow gazes with curiosity at the glint of knife as it swings up and then down onto a former cellmate. I wonder if he knows what he sees, or if that cold, calm gaze means that he has accepted his status in the food chain.
"Dua ayam kampung," my father requests. We are shopping for a dinner party for the extended family. I look back at the trolley basket, at the parcels of other cold, dead things. They are more slimy, but there isn't much blood to look at, and there isn't much that looks back. The lady opens the cage, the chickens rush squawking to the corners, like a game of musical chairs. One doesn't find a safe chair. It is stuck at the fringe of bodies pressing against the iron. She drags the slow one out by the neck, pinioning its wings behind it before she places it on the weighing scale. Satisfied, she hands it to her assistant. Its nervous clucking rises to hysterical screeches as he carries it away, out of sight.
The chicken seller tells us to return in fifteen minutes. My father and I oblige. We head to the butchers' section where the pork sellers' stalls are. The floor is wet with melted ice dripping off the fishmongers' tables as we pass by. Enthusiastic stall hands wave fish in our faces, opening their gills to show their redness. "Ini cantik, very nice fish, sir, twelve ringgit a kg." "Miss, miss any fish for you? Sotong?" But its eye was dull and jellied. A fresh fish looks back. Even when dead, there's a gleam in the eye that takes a while to disappear. Beneath the table, a blue crate of swirling black things. Several whiskers protrude from the mass and sway in the air. It's a glistening mass of catfish, the layer on top writhing their way below, drowning in the air above; the layer below struggling to the top, crushed beneath their fellows.
I turn the corner after my father. The white-tiled walls aren't so clean here. They have a mottled appearance, stained with brownish streaks and specks. Old blood, maybe. Huge hooks suspend various parts of meat, even whole carcasses, from long steel bars. The butcher takes hold of one chunk, slices a hunk off it and chops it up for a customer. The pinkish meat left on the hook sways gently in tandem with the knife. We order trotters. The leg is difficult to cut. The butcher's chopper gets lodged in the bone, so he raises the whole leg with the chopper, and smashes it down on the board until it cuts through. He does this several times, then gathers the pieces into a pink plastic bag.
