Buffeted by the chopper's reverberating growl and factory workers' shouts, Suki scraped up machine-chewed feathers, meat, and bones and dumped them into a bucket. The stair's metal railing slipped under her fingers. She gripped it until the cold burned, and she hauled bucket and shop broom up onto the catwalk over the Duck Plucker's blades.

The air swirled cold and aggressive up there, and Suki gasped in the smell of churning bird parts as she emptied the bucket back into the machine. She blinked at the glint and whirl of metal.

"Hurry up." A worker yelled at her from the concrete shop floor. "We can't close it up 'til you sweep off the catwalk." His grin framed horse-yellow teeth in grimy flesh. "Unless you want to be blasted by the next cleaning spray."

She clutched the shop broom and let go of the railing, but the machine's hum vibrated up through her soles from the catwalk, thrumming through her bones.

Clumps of bird splattered the catwalk. Damn those free-range fanatics, blundering through here with their hammers.

She hooked the bucket over the railing and planted her broom. They want a yard for birds to run around in.

She thought of her cramped, dark room, the crowded subways. What about free-range people? Pushing broom, she slopped a load of stinking muck over the catwalk's edge.

And damn those jokers, opening the blade-changing panel. Right on time, cleansing spray had shot through the blades. Blood and bone and flesh had rained down, and the fanatics had tumbled out the swinging doors.

Did anybody care that the mess had to be cleaned up? Oh, no. That's Suki's job.

What're people going to eat if not this? She stared down at the bird bits crammed into the worn ridges of her shoe's sole. Stomping caused the catwalk to shake. She gripped the railing until it settled into the machine's thrum and shoved more bird stuff toward the railing. Her broom's mucky bristles went over, and she caught a peek of the blades, shuddered, and focused on the late-nite-zenner's advice.

The channel three zenner was best. Suki pictured him, sitting cross-legged on a mat in front of fake sunsets. His soothing voice murmured at her. "Concentrate."

She'd gotten pretty good. Even with her feet sliding over bird slime, she could shallow breath and go not-there. Her body went on auto, not seeing the red and yellow mess clogging the bristles of her brush.

"Be somewhere beautiful", he'd said, but there was no such place. Everywhere was cold and grey. Grey metal walls, grey drawn faces.

So Suki concentrated on being nowhere. The machine roar faded. The stink, the cold, her sore feet retreated, and somewhere far away her hands gripped the broom and knocked bird bits off the edge of the catwalk, back toward the hungry blades.

Until the free-range fanatics boiled back through the swinging doors. Their yells and the workers' jeers bounced back at her from every metal surface. She slammed back into her body just as her brush slid over the edge. She braced against the heavy brush's pull, but her feet slid forward and the catwalk swayed back. Her lower belly struck the rail, her feet slipped back, blood rushed to her head, and she tipped over into space.

What's happening? Suki flew, free as nowhere for a moment. But the sharp sound grew, called her toward rushing blades. She turned away, rejecting them, and saw a free-range fanatic's surprised face. For the first time, she realized, She's human, like me. Horror grew on the other girl's face, and Suki could see in the girl's eyes what was going to happen. Suki parts. Suki mess.

Anticipating the bite of flashing metal, she shallow breathed, closed her eyes, and went no-where.

Blades brush like angel's wings. Is this what heaven smells like?

Not like the vat she plunged into, chopped up bird held by cold metal. Muck filled her nose and mouth. She sputtered to the surface and groped for the top, pulled herself up and out, banged her hip on the concrete floor. But at least she'd stopped the fighting. Fanatics and workers had run across the shop to witness Suki chop suey. They stood over her in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, staring at her with wide eyes.

The factory doctor sent her home for the weekend with a bandage on her skinned elbow. Still gooey, she trudged off the subway to her one-room apartment, given space for a change by folks scrunching away from her smell.

Showered and wrapped in her old robe, she turned on the news instead of the zenner while she ate her watery soup. And there she was on TV, bumping the railing and flipping over, her puzzled expression caught, close up, by a fanatic's palm-cam.

She changed the channel when they ran it again. The zenner's voice, instead of soothing, growled with a blade's harmonics. She switched it off. She could hear it, though, through her apartment's thin walls from sets on either side.

Drifting off to sleep, she slid away from the sound of traffic and babies crying and people laughing and fighting around her into a concentration of air. Light, flight, heat blew around her without burning, in and out, like the universe breathing.

She spent the weekend in bed, shivering, halfway between waking and sleep, wishing for her dream's warmth, afraid of it.

Monday, aching and cold, Suki jostled off the subway into a press of people dressed in faded blue coveralls. So many janitors? What kind of mess did those fanatics make after she left?

At the front gate the guard shoved a paper at her. "Sign, please." He shoved another paper toward her shoulder and a girl's hand reached past her to grab it. Suki glanced at the blurred ink. She pressed her thumb into the heat-sensitive putty at the bottom and dropped the paper, like everyone ahead of her, into a box before squeezing into the shop.

Inside, people crowded every aisle. Suki was pushed with the mass of bodies under pipes and past workstations toward the Duck Plucker's huge bulk. In the wide, high-ceilinged room, the bodies spread out, and Suki saw TV cameras, their operators sweeping them over the crowd on flexible booms, blinking at the faces turned up toward the catwalk. Suki's gaze followed. Four people stood on the rickety metal platform, all wearing janitor's coveralls. Suki felt her stomach drop into her shoes. A young man crouched, wobbling, on the rail. "It's ok," she murmured, covering her ears to block out the blades' hum. "He'll just bounce off the panel." But the warning light flashed on the Plucker's side. The panel was open.

Over the Duck Plucker's drone, a TV commentator's voice rang out over the speakers. "The acolyte is up on the catwalk, idealized broom and all." Dramatic pause. "But he looks to be chickening out."

The crowd murmured something. The sound flowed around her in time to the grinding blades, and Suki strained to make out the words.

A camera slid past her face and someone shouted her name. Her boss? She jumped, trying to remember what she should be doing.

"An exclusive for channel 25, folks. The untouchable janitor has finally arrived." The commentator's deep voice rumbled through speakers. Cameramen waded through the crowd, their boom-cameras swinging toward her. The crowd's face turned. Hands pawed her face, ripped her sleeves and pockets. People on the catwalk shouted, "She watches, she watches," and the acolyte caught her eye.

"One like Suki!" His shriek, broadcast through a small mic pinned to his coverall, turned the crowd away from Suki. She stood in the eye of a storm as he fell, clutching his broom in one white-knuckled hand. His desperate eyes fixed on her face until the machine wall came between them. Go nowhere, she told him, not aloud.

But angel-sharp blades gave a gurgling hum.

Her fingers like ice, she found herself on the subway platform, scrambling into the first car that opened its doors.

Locked inside her apartment, she listened to the news that drifted to her from apartments on every side.

"Followers of Sukiism, dressed in idealized janitor's outfits, threw themselves into Poultry America grinding machines in three factories, today."

Sukiism? Suki stared at her hands, hearing angel's wings.

A commercial for the latest retro-craze, live talkshow TV, seeped in around the blank edges. "…featuring battling bishops of Sukiism's splinter groups. And our very own scientific expert to explain how Suki did it. Live!"

She took the subway. Pushed her way through the crowds gathered at the stage entrance. Women with clipboards and hand-free mics let her in. A big man led her down a narrow, crowded corridor and sat her in a large, black chair. No one listened to her when she tried to explain that she wanted to talk to the bishops. When the make-up woman dabbed at the circles under Suki's eyes, she left the chair, pushed past people pushing past, and stopped alongside a curtain, staring at the platform, the lights, the audience crammed onto rickety bleachers. A man held her sleeve, whispering into his ear-hooked mic, telling her she'd go on after the first commercial.

On the stark metal platform, four people sat on wide, white cushions. A smiling woman shifted gracefully against the white leather and introduced a man dressed in Poultry America coveralls. He looked too clean to work in Suki's factory, though, and he wore a bishop's miter on his head.

"You claim to be Sukiism's chief bishop." The woman's voice held sharp amusement. "How did this cult spring up, and what are your tenants?"

The man smiled a bright, straight-toothed smile into the camera. "It's plain to see that Suki transcended time and space on her journey through that chopping machine. Her followers hope to do the same."

The skinny man beside him nodded. "Jordan S. Gruber said it all. 'We have the ability to create and co-create both our subjective, psychological realities and our objective physical realities.'" His shrug unbalanced him, and he scrambled his heels on the metal platform to keep from sliding off his cushion.

Yellow 'applause' lights flashed and the audience howled.

He righted himself and waited until the crowd quieted, then continued as though nothing had happened. "Suki didn't want to be chewed up. The factory workers and protestors, watching her, didn't want to see her chewed up…"

"Chewed Suki!" A man yelled from the audience, followed by scattered laughter.

He raised his eyebrows but ignored the comment. "Energy follows thought, gentlemen. It's as simple as that."

The light flashed. The audience growled like buzzing blades.

The woman smiled politely, then waved her lacquered nails, and the audience's shouts died.

The bishop said, "Those who Suki truly blesses will ride the blades unharmed."

Suki pulled away from the man beside her and slid past the curtain.

"NO!" A man brushed past her onto the stage. Dressed like her in faded blue coveralls, he bent to shake his fist at the mitered bishop and yelled, "Bzzt! The blessed are released to the realm of air while their bodies become holy relics of animal matter ground fine."

Bird burgers become holy relics? Suki pushed back her dark hair and stepped onto the stage, her shoulders tensed. She turned to the audience, blinking at the cameras, the crowd, the lights.

"Suki!" The un-mitered bishop flopped down onto her feet, knocking her shins.

Suki pulled her feet out from under the un-mitered bishop's belly and scrambled toward the curtain. The lights dimmed, and a man said, "Commercial." Suki stopped, squinted to see the platform's edge.

She felt a hand on her arm. Towed along, relieved to be thrown out, Suki wondered what she would have said. But when they pushed through the door into mid-afternoon's haze, she blinked up at the man's hard jaw line as he pulled her into a large, dark car.

"Who are you?" Suki looked at Jawline, taking up two-thirds of the backseat.

The driver pulled into traffic. "We work for Poultry America, same as you," he said, his eyes on the road.

"How're they going to stop this?" They had to have a plan, didn't they?

But they never looked at her.

The car purred through streets and up onto overpasses that climbed out of the smog. Tall buildings spaced out around her, then shrank to long, low glass and metal multi-levels surrounded by landscaped green. Green. Suki tried to drink in the green but couldn't make it reach her heart, haunted by the reflection of her own grey eyes. Haunted by the face of the young man. His eyes like hers. Wide and drab and bruised. Was he tired of the cold? Are eyes windows of the soul? Someone in an old movie had said so.

On a narrow, white road through office complexes, sculpted hedges keeping the thin, bright trees from wandering, something arrowed toward the car. Small, beak pointed, blue-tail flashing, a bird flew straight and true and strong on a mission of vital importance. Sounds of angel wings, sharp as knives, whispered to her in those blue flashing wings.

Suki, mesmerized by the touches of impossible color, by the straight quick flap of fragile wings, watched it through her own window, then through the front right seat's, then through the windshield, all in the space of a breath.

It'll make it, she thought, and watched for the driver's tensed shoulder, watched to see his body shift as he took his foot off the accelerator.

Casual bump on the left front bumper, absorbed by the car so Suki felt no jar at all. The blue-flash wings spread, the body tumbled in a perfect arc over the car.

Suki turned to look behind, caught its arc in the rear-view. Not safe anymore, not free, its flight stripped of power and purpose. Its jeweled belly twisted into her view as it landed, soft as snow, on hot concrete. She pictured it like the decades-old garbage in the subway, never cleaned up, becoming sludge puddled on stone, unrescued, unrecycled by nature's janitors.

She stared under the dashboard's dark recesses and saw that the driver's foot wasn't controlling the speed; he'd given that over to the machine.

When the car slowed and pulled under an awning marked Poultry America, she got out. Instead of following Jawline, she walked to the car's front bumper. On the far left corner, a wing-shaped blood splatter, vivid red, beautiful and tragic, arced across the black paint. The bird's blood, so red, so clear and sparkling and bright, startled her. Poultry's blood in the factory was dull watery orange-red.

The suits inside were smaller versions of Jawline, sitting at their comfort in wide, brown chairs that swallowed Suki.

"No more long hours on your feet." One smiled at her, eyes bright. He gestured at canned cold drinks sitting in rows on a table. "Of course, you won't officially work for us."

Another suit set a paper on her knees. "You're booked on a small tour of talk shows. We'll get you a script." He stopped and met her eyes, his own squinting. "You can read?"

She stared at the paper, at the heat-sensitive putty that would take her thumbprint. "Why hasn't the government stopped it?" Her voice sounded squeaky. She shivered in the air-conditioned air.

Suit One shrugged. "Freedom of religion, sweetie. Backbone of the Constitution."

"We tried to bar 'em from our plants, at first. They got court orders." Suit Two perched on her chair's arm, frowning sympathetically.

The air conditioning blended in behind their voices, humming.

"People don't mind that people are getting mixed into their chicken burgers?"

"Come on. How long have people known that there's an acceptable amount of rat crap and roach parts allowed in hot dogs? How many people eat hot dogs each day?"

Suit Two reached down to pat Suki's knee. "It's a fad. In one, two months, it'll pass."

Suit One winked at Suit Two. "Meanwhile, production's up point oh five percent."

She had to warm her thumb in her mouth before it would leave an impression in the putty.

Live coverage of a middle-aged woman yelling, "Suki or nirvana!" and throwing herself into a duck plucker greeted Suki when she got back to her apartment.

But what can I do? There. Out in the open. Suki sat and watched the news and felt her shoulders relax. I'm supposed to do something. She'd been fighting that thought for too long; it startled her but brought a bit of warmth to her cold fingertips.

But what? Angel-blades whispered to her from the TV, changing their tone as the middle-aged woman fell. She almost understood their whispers.

She stood in the crowded, airless terminal waiting for the next train, staring at decades-old wads of gum, bits of candy wrappers, and dirt pressed into the thin crevice between peeling wall and concrete floor. Where'd the dirt come from? She thought of the concrete, metal world and stared at the dirty pores of her hands.

At Poultry America, she signed the responsibility disclaimer and wandered with bored crowds through the plant, dodging workers and TV cameras. The catwalk was empty, the stair railing as cold under her fingers as she remembered.

The air swirled cold and aggressive as ever, putrid and oily through her hair. She blinked at the glint and whirl of metal. Would she make it? The bird hadn't. But if it had, oh if it had. There would have been something wonderful on the other side.

Just another hedge-chained tree. And if she did go nowhere? Suki thought of all those bruised eyes, of the young man, the middle-aged woman, and others that would follow. Is that my fault? She called out to the blades, "Is it?" and they hummed back at her, so she could almost understand.

Shouts broke through their song, dispersing it into shattered fragments, dissolving angel's voices into buzzing metal, and Suki looked down into boom-camera eyes.

She felt like a bluebird as she free-fell off the platform toward the Duck Plucker's blades, listening to the razor-sharp whisper of angel's wings.

The End

Bio

"I live in TX, which is a weird-ass place. So, I write about weird-ass stuff."