Onyx Roses

Chapter Two

"You're not to puke everywhere, are you?" he asked bitterly as he began to slice perfectly into the hide of the baby pig laying before us.

I shook my head as I slid on my own pair of rubber gloves. "No, I've seen much worse," I replied, placing my hand in my palm as I continued watching the straight line he had made down the middle of the piglet's belly. The look he had given me earlier this morning still had me feeling unnerved, but what better way to hide it than to act like it had never happened?

"Like?" he prompted, not taking his eyes off of his work and still sounding very bitter.

"I've seen wolves tear apart a cow elk while it was giving birth," I replied, thinking back to that horrible spring morning. I supressed a shudder and focused my attention to Xavier as he peeled back the skin and began to slide his hand around the stomach and pull it out.

"That is pretty gruesome," he replied simply and then gently set the stomach onto one of the stainless steel trays. He pulled out the entrails and piled them beside the stomach and then pushed the pig towards me. "But I've seen worse."

"Like?" I asked as I grabbed one of the scalpels and ran the sharpened edge under and around the liver.

He chuckled, and I felt a little better at the fact that he seemed less bitter. "I would say it, but I'd really hate for you to throw up all over our perfectly sliced ham," he said, smiling at me.

I gave him a sideways glance and then held the liver up in the light. "I've always wondered what liver tastes like," I said, slowly bringing it to my mouth.

His hand snaked out and grabbed the liver from my hands and plopped it down on a different tray, shaking his head with a grin on his face. "Okay, okay. Let's see..." he said as I went back into the pig's body for the heart. "I've killed and gutted a wild boar with my bare hands."

I rolled my eyes. "Anyone could do that if they tried," I replied.

He took my challenge in stride. "I had to clean up after my mom lost my almost-little-brother on the bathroom floor, and then I had to go outside and slit the throat of one of our mares who'd broken a leg," he said, suddenly growing serious again.

I paused midway through cutting open the diaphram and looked up at him. I saw guarded pain in his eyes and I felt bad for challenging him to one-up his first story. "You're right," I said in a low voice. "That's very gruesome. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he snapped. "It's how things are with my family."

"Can I ask how old you were when your mom...?" I asked, unable to finish to the sentence when I saw his jaw tighten a little.

He looked away from me and poked at the liver with his scalpel. "I was six," he said in a voice barely audible.

I felt my eyes widen and I stared at him in shock. "What kind of family makes their six-year-old boy clean up after his mother had a miscarriage?" I asked.

He didn't look up at me. "My family," he whispered.

I forced myself to look away, back at the dead piglet laying sliced open on the table in front of me. I had seen gruesome things, and had even done gruesome things myself, but all that I had seen was when I was at an age where I could handle it. The birthing cow and the wolves happened the spring I turned 14, and every gruesome thing after that was the night I was turned, and after. I couldn't imagine seeing something like that at such a young age. "No child should have to see something like that," I said slowly as I began to dig for the heart.

After a moment, his eyes slid over to watch me do my own perfected slicing. I had cut open a young pig many times before this, and had trained my hand to be steady. Even the smell of blood didn't bother me anymore. "You have a pretty steady hand," he remarked.