The View From The Killing Floor

“Oh, I tell you. Women are not the sensitive sex. That's one of the grand delusions of literature. Men are the true romanticists.” - Cary Grant as Philip Adams in Indiscreet (1958)


She told him to meet him out on Gilway Lane. They’d go windscreen shopping while the going was getting late, windscreen shopping like window shopping, only your work wrung eyes would look upon the three or four story heights of the houses you knew you’d never be able to afford - from the driver/passenger seats of your rusty old Citroen, Fiat or, if you were lucky, just 5 wheels and some doors. 
    “Dream with me a little, Dezzy”, Halima whispered. 
    “Alright, babe” he said. 
    Something about the way he’d given her his everything didn’t sit right with the gods of fate, but he was too doped up on love to feel their predatory eyes lying in wait, never in a million years did it cross his mind that he’d be homed up on Heartbreak Hill, the address every man, at some point in his life, must seek out and find.
    Up there - 
    Late - 
    On Gilway lane - 
    Looking over the city and its ways, it’s nightly raucous fires that blaze so bright they set fire to the landscape and bring about these days - hot as hell! 
    Dezzy thought their love was indestructible. Maybe he was right at one time. Never would their love head down to the Killing Floor. 
    The Killing Floor. 
    True Love’s Killing Floor.
    It was a term Dezzy’s old man had coined. 
    Dezzy’s old man, a burly, quiet, simple man, but his soul of hardened concrete was painted by a bright stripe or two of a poetic disposition. He worked in a slaughterhouse in Rock Road, a commune in the Boarville province. He often worked on the killing floor, surrounded by the clean and loving gore that turned cattle into product. 
    It was a ruthless job but someone had to do it.
    ...and the killing floor of Love? Well, Dezzy’s dad always explained its meaning every chance he got. Dezzy’s dad had it that modern love was increasingly becoming more and more like the slaughterhouse. Love, like cattle, was reared, cared for, fed, nurtured, grown and as it matured into a clumsy beast that’d fattened up on the sweetened treats of a secure and self assured existence the day would finally come when all sunny days must turn to rain and where once there was love there would now be prey as the fattened apple of someones eye was shipped off to the production line with the cold calculation of a product oriented mind that had stripped itself of guilt and shame to make way for the next unsuspecting victim of the now emotionless bolt impatiently waiting on bloody hearts waiting on the harvest. 
    But Dezzy always put them down to the bitter ramblings of a poor, betrayed soul. Halima could never arrive at such a point - whether by boredom, distraction or lack of appreciation - to become so emotionless as to disregard the years of good love with which they had built their home. 
    To almost become a totally different person. 
    No, that couldn’t happen to us, he thought. 
    Besides, there would be signs. 
    The sun started to rise a bloody red hewn across a naive sky and below the busy little livestock began to come alive and scurry about their daily lives - to and fro.   Dezzy looked at Halima. She was fast asleep in her seat. How long had she been out for? He gently shook her with feather vibrations from millennia of love and devotion that arrived from an ancient school of emotion, one that was honed and grown across endless plains where his ancestors were raised and learnt the first lessons of love. 
    But the vibrations were clipped like summer flowers at the height of their powers. 
    “Eurgh!” she let out and shook herself all up and down like a teenager warding off cooties. “For God’s sake, Dezzy. I was dreaming I was somewhere else.”