Hunger

The skinned lamb seemed perfectly clean. Tissue that is slight and smooth and luminescent always gleams like a pearl, and the skinned lamb looked like a pearl, to me. The thin tissue that had once been hidden by skin was stretched so taut across its form, that I could make out the vague, darke shapes of organs beneath the muscle. There was no blood shed from the skinning itself, although the peeling back from the stomach to the spine of the poor creature's wool sounded like peeling gauze tape away from rubber. It sounded like routine, it sounded innocuous, but the air stank to me of savagery and the guilt that we preyed on such small things. But we were only hungry, and no one who felt the gurgling of our stomachs could ever condemn us for it. When you are hungry, you must nourish yourself, even if nourishing yourself means killing a lamb.