A Butcher's Fable
A parable of salt, silence, and the words that cut deep.
The following is a literary folk horror story I wrote with just a little bit of Southern Gothic flair by way of the Caribbean. The initial prompt was engaging with threats that come from within the person and their community. It’s about a 6-10 minute read followed by Author’s Notes.
Juan Albizú had always been an industrious man. His shop, a narrow sliver of whitewashed stone wedged between the haberdasher and the baker’s wife’s miserable excuse for a confectionary, was a place of unimpeachable respectability. There was no blood in the street outside, no rancid smell of old flesh to taint the salt-bright air that drifted in from the bay. The floor, scrubbed nightly with a solution of vinegar and lime, had never known the sticky impertinence of an uncleaned spill. His knives, of which there were many, gleamed with the light of fanaticism.
And yet, still, the knives liked to whisper.
He could hear them now, even as he pressed his customary geniality upon Pedrito Betances, a child of seven or eight, the son of one of the dock laborers, who had not yet been broken by the certainty of his future. The boy had been sent, evidently against his will, to retrieve a parcel of chorizo, and stood shifting his bare feet in the doorway, eyeing the cool dark of the shop’s interior with marked suspicion.
Juan wrapped the links in paper and tied them with a crisp knot. A tidy shop is a trusted shop, his mother liked to say, before she’d gone blind. And so it was. The women of Bahía Roja bought from Juan because his apron was always white, because the weight of the meat was always fair, because he spoke kindly to their children.
“Here, nene,” he said, dropping the bundle into the boy’s reluctant hands. “Tell your mother I set aside un hueso for her broth.”
Pedrito did not reply. He stared. A small face, round as baked bread, unblinking. Juan was about to prompt him when the boy tilted his head and asked, in the light, indifferent tone of a child who had no interest in whether the answer frightened him:
“Señor, why does the meat talk when no one is here?”
Something cold and thin unfurled itself at the base of Juan’s skull. He had, for years, honed the art of steady hands. His knife did not falter, nor did the well-practiced mechanism of his smile. He laughed, and it was the laugh of a man unbothered by nonsense.
“Ay, nene,” he said, taking Pedrito by the shoulder and turning him gently toward the sunlit street. “What a lively imagination you have. Next, you’ll tell me the fish complain before the net closes in!”
The boy hesitated a moment longer, then, as if deciding he had spent long enough inside, bolted, his feet striking hard against the dusty cobblestones.
Juan waited until the last of the child’s echo had vanished before he turned back toward the counter. His eyes fell upon the slab of flank steak waiting to be portioned.
The cut was fresh. Taken that morning from a cow he had seen walking the previous afternoon, snuffling at the sparse grass outside the slaughterhouse. It had been a good, solid animal, thick about the neck, heavy in the ribs. It had not deserved an easy death, but neither had it suffered an unkind one.
And yet.
In the hush that settled after Pedrito’s departure, there was a noise—a sound so low and close that it might have been mistaken for a sigh. It did not come from outside.
Nor did it come from Juan.
For a long moment, he did not move. He listened. The sound did not repeat itself. The only thing that moved was the lazy stirring of a fly somewhere near the door. The meat, of course, was meat. No more, no less.
Still.
He would trim the fat carefully, all the same.
After dinner with his wife, Juan returned to the shop under the indifferent gaze of the moon. The streets of Bahía Roja were empty, save for the occasional muttering of the sea, which always had more to say than strictly necessary. The door swung open at his touch, the scent of cold fat and smoked blood rising to meet him like a faithful dog.
A foolish errand, this. He knew it. The boy had been mistaken, or lying, or—or nothing at all, he told himself, striking a match and watching the flame sputter in the dim.
Still, the flank steak waited where he had left it. A long, pale thing upon the counter, lined with threads of glistening yellow fat. He stepped toward it, knife in hand.
And then…
Soft as breath, unhurried, utterly familiar. His own voice, thick with sleep, murmured from the raw sinew:
“Not this one.”
The knife fell from his hand, landing flat upon the counter with an unceremonious clatter. A lesser man might have fled. But Juan—steady, careful Juan—only pressed a hand to the sudden tightness in his chest.
A trick of the wind, perhaps. Or the hour.
Yes.
Slowly, without taking his eyes from the meat, he reached for the lamp, extinguishing the flame.
The darkness that followed was a comfort.
For in the dark, at least, there was nothing to hear.
Nothing at all.
The sea had been restless all morning.
From the shop’s open doorway, Juan watched the waves turn sluggish and thick, rolling toward shore with the reluctant air of an animal dragging itself home to die. The fishermen muttered of bad currents, of things surfacing that had no business leaving the depths.
But it was not the sea that unsettled Juan.
It was the woman standing in his shop, her lips pinched into a line as she placed a bundle of waxed paper upon the counter.
“This,” said Dolores Barceló, the baker’s wife, “is talking meat.”
Juan glanced at the package. “So it complains now?” He laughed. A butcher’s laugh—warm, solid, as reassuring as the careful fold of a clean apron.
Dolores did not smile. “It moaned in the pot. It sounded like you.”
There was a silence then. Outside, the tide pulled itself over the sand in long, gasping strokes.
Juan exhaled. “Salt does strange things to the ear. The wind as well.”
Dolores hesitated, uncertain.
He unwrapped the bundle, fingers steady. The cut lay there, inert. It was a fine piece, well-marbled, fresh. Meat, and nothing more.
Still, he would burn it.
He wrapped it again with slow precision, offered Dolores a new cut, one hand resting lightly on the cleaver.
“Aquí no hay misterios,” he said gently.
And perhaps he meant it.
But when she left, he placed the paper-wrapped parcel in the stove, and for a moment—just a moment—the fat sizzled like laughter.
Juan had seen storms rise from nothing before, had watched the sky blacken and roil like something living, like something furious. But this was beyond fury.
The sea did not rise or churn; it pressed itself against the shore in slow, heavy breaths, as if unwilling to disturb the hush that had settled over Bahía Roja.
The town did not speak of it.
But they gathered.
They gathered by the docks, voices low and needling. Pedrito had not been seen since yesterday. His mother’s face was drawn, her hands knotted in her apron as she spoke to Juan’s wife, Isabelina.
Juan watched from his shop, sleeves rolled high against the humidity, a careful frown arranged upon his face.
A missing child was a tragedy, yes. But it was not his tragedy.
Isabelina looked at him.
Across the sun-streaked street, through the muddle of villagers and the murmur of accusation, she looked at him.
A slow thing, that gaze—if it could be called that, for there was no accusation in it, no wild grief, no violent certainty.
Only the delicate, precise horror of recognition.
She turned from Pedrito’s mother and walked toward him, stepping lightly over the tide-slicked cobblestones, past the net-menders and fishmongers, past the neighbors who had once whispered of him—but never to her.
Inside the shop, Juan reached for his knife to look busy.
A useless gesture.
Because when she stepped through the door, she did not speak of where the child had gone.
She only said, very quietly, “Tell me he never had your eyes.”
The night came in thick, curling under the door in slow, creeping fingers. Juan sat at the counter, the lamp burning low, the scent of tallow thick in the air.
He had not spoken to Isabelina since the afternoon. Not properly. She had stood at the kitchen table, watching him with that unbearable stillness, that awful, knowing quiet. And then, as if something in her had made a final decision, she had left.
Now, outside, voices tangled in the night air.
They were calling for someone.
Juan set down the whetstone, his hands bloodless from how tightly he had been gripping the blade.
The voices swelled.
A name.
Isabelina.
A man’s voice tore through the crowd, the drunk from the café.
“The meat’s been speaking! You think we don’t hear it? It says she knows!”
Juan reached the door just as the shouting peaked, just as footsteps rang sharp against the cobbles, just as the town dragged his wife toward the docks, their hands a hundred vices around her arms.
She did not struggle.
She did not even look at him.
A single voice, high and sharp, cut through the din:
“She knows what happened to the boy! She knows!”
The heat of the shop, of the lamps, of his own skin, slammed against him like a scalding hand.
He could stop this.
He could tell them.
His fingers dug into the doorframe. Nails bit into the wood, deep enough to splinter. He could move.
The whispers curled close against his ear, breathless and laughing.
“Or you could let them carve.”
His hands did not move.
His mouth did not open.
The sea was calm in the morning.
The tide slid over the sand in slow, unhurried strokes, smoothing over something unsightly. The town was much the same. A few whispers, a few lowered voices, then the business of life resumed. Bread to bake, nets to mend, fish to gut.
Juan sat alone in the shop, hands steady, knife keen. The slab of meat before him was firm, red, beautiful in the way all things were when they did not flinch.
No one had spoken to him directly. Not yet. But they had looked. And in their looking, there had been something new. An absence, a space where his wife had once stood beside him.
She had not come home.
Could not.
There were only fresh footprints leading toward the cliffs beyond the docks. No one spoke of them. No one followed to their conclusion.
These footsteps, too, were a carving. A neat, irreversible cut.
Juan pressed the blade into the flesh. The steel slid through effortlessly. The pieces fell away, clean and soundless. No whispers. No protests.
For a moment, he almost believed the quiet would last.
Then, deep in the marrow, a word bloomed. A single, thin murmur, up from the bone.
“More.”
His fingers tightened around the handle. He exhaled, slow and measured.
His fate was written in tendon and gristle, in the long, shivering stretch of a knife’s edge.
And so he did the only thing he could do.
He kept cutting.
He kept lying.
Author’s Notes
I’ve always been fascinated by the quiet rituals of everyday horror. How we cope with the unspeakable, not by confronting it but by developing habits. This story began, oddly enough, with a smell I remember from the markets in Puerto Rico, back when I was Pedrito’s age. The butcher was slicing through a flank steak so expertly, so cleanly, that I imagined he’d done it a thousand times without blinking. It made me wonder: what happens when someone so meticulous, so good at their work, starts hearing the product of their labor speak?
I never let go of that thought.
“A Butcher’s Fable” is folk horror not in the conventional sense of cults or paganism, but in the older, quieter tradition of communal silence and individual denial, specifically when it comes to moral failings. Bahía Roja, like so many coastal towns in Latin America and the Caribbean, is a place where gossip moves faster than the tide, where morality changes with the generation. I wanted the horror here to bloom not from not violence, but the toxic side of restraint. Inaction. What’s not said, what’s not seen, what’s never truly admitted.
Juan Albizú is a man who has built his life around a tidy shop. Control. His knives are sharp, his floors are clean, his hands never tremble. And yet, despite that discipline, he cannot prevent the slow leak of rot within himself. His world isn’t haunted by ghosts so much as the slow boil of guilt. “Tell me you never had his eyes.” At this point, it’s possible Juan doesn’t even remember that he fathered a child with another woman, seemingly unbeknownst to his wife. But the meat he carves is where the truth comes out.
There’s also something deeply cultural in this idea of talking meat, an echo of ancestral beliefs where everything, even the inanimate, has a soul. In Afro-Caribbean and Latine traditions, food is often spiritual currency. It feeds gods, binds families, memorializes the dead, etc. But what happens when the meat answers back? When the offering refuses its role as sacrifice?
At its heart, this story is about complicity and the ways we cut around truth, how we let others suffer in our silence, how we convince ourselves that cleanliness is morality. I wanted to write a horror story where the monster never needs to bare its teeth, because we’re already so deeply afraid of what we already know about ourselves.
And sometimes the knife doesn’t slip.
Sometimes it lands exactly where you meant it to.