The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop. The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop, and he was sitting and reading a novel. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler with telekinetic abilities that promised to upend with stunning permanency the rhythms of life in an average American town. The bullied high schooler in the novel was, critically, a girl. The bullied high schooler in the novel was, critically, a girl who had been made to go to church picnics and who at church picnics had found herself ridiculed for a wardrobe malfunction that threatened to expose her nakedness to the world. The malfunction would not be the first or the last time the bullied high schooler’s physical self would be treated like a joke against her will. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time because the novel would begin with the bullied high schooler in a compromising position in the shower and would move quickly on to a host of indignities: the peanut butter in her dark hair—always the butcher imagined her this way although this detail was inaccurate to the text itself—or the skinned knees the butcher inferred she would acquire on being tripped, falling up and down the aisles of classroom after classroom. The butcher was reading in fits and starts, sometimes the same word or sentence or passage more than once, as one customer after another pulled open the door that jangled the bell that prompted him to look up from the book whose spine he had already broken. The butcher would feel a disorienting mix of hope and annoyance at the sound of the bell; his shop was not busy and busyness was what he needed both financially and personally, but on the other hand he was occupied with the book and was anxious to discover what he felt certain would be the bullied high schooler’s cunning and talented acts of vengeance. The butcher read on, and now the teenagers were screaming at their naked classmate. Now the teenagers were screaming at their naked classmate whom they showed no mercy because children—for that is what they still technically were—well, children were cruel; this was something that the butcher also knew, being the sort of man about whom small boys would whistle and sing mean-spirited songs. The song the teenagers were directing toward their naked classmate referred to her as food. It made her a lump of dessert. The butcher read on, and as he read he envisioned the face of the classmate as the face of the neighborhood girl who shopped there for her father although he knew that unlike the novel’s anti-heroine she didn’t go to school. There was something unsettling about the neighborhood girl, like she might at any time prove capable of setting the shop aflame. A state of emergency would be declared. White papers would be written. The place they lived was average; the butcher knew it and the neighborhood girl knew it and they all knew it. The butcher flipped pages he’d skimmed instead of reading. “One steak?” the butcher asked. He always asked her. Always the answer stayed the same.

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Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Burnside Review, Colorado Review, The Journal, New Letters, ROOM, and South Dakota Review. She reads for Seneca Review and CRAFT.