« » »The first morning it was only strange. By the third it had become a story people told with their voices lowered, as if the quantity itself might hear them. An old woman came into Tomas’s shop at opening, paid in worn notes and coins counted twice, and left with sixty kilos of beef packed into bags she could barely keep from dragging on the wet pavement. » » » »
It was not the good cuts. She never asked for the good cuts. She wanted the cheap muscle, the pieces other customers wrinkled their noses at, the meat that would have gone into mince or been sold off to the soup kitchen if the soup kitchen still took deliveries. She clutched the bags against her coat as though someone might snatch them in the twelve minutes it took her to reach the old service road. Her eyes moved constantly — shop window, alley mouth, the bus stop, the man unloading crates across the street — the way a person looks when they are carrying something they cannot afford to drop and cannot afford to explain.
