When her daughter called and said the horse was shaking, and his sable, short hair was foamy and iridescent, the mother spoke very deliberately: “Get him out of the stall, honey” she told her “whatever you do, get him out of the stall.” She didn’t tell her why—that if she didn’t and he died in there, rigor mortis would set in and the renderer would have to break all the bones in the horse’s legs to fit him through the door. And that then, like her mother, whenever she heard her father in bed at night idly bending his toes or someone at the grocery store nervously pulling each finger, or her mother crack the backbone of a chicken with the weight of her body and a cleaver, she would hear it again: giant glass knuckles, amplified and repeated and repeated and repeated and, finally, the noise of the broken body, a thousand-pound bag of still-warm lumps, being pulled by three men over the worn earth.