Slaughterhouse

Written by me as the 10 minute speed-writing exercise (with a surprise title) during the Clacton Writer's Group meeting last night and, now, exactly transcribed below:

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The Slaughters were a well-known family in the area. In fact there had been generations of Slaughters. A Slaughter line radiating back - it was said - to a noble who fought in the War of the Roses.

The latest issue of young Slaughters - like most people - never really understood the ins-and-outs, the Political and Royal machinations involved in the War of the Roses. Nor the relationship betwen Yorkshire and Lancashire, red roses and white roses. It was sad that something so central to their family's stock was so little understood by its descendants.

They simply hated the fact that the family home was known as Slaughter House - and could not be changed, as if the name itself, as opposed to just the actual house, had National Trust protection for never being allowed to change into a more acceptable name. Could names be protected? It was like living in an abattoir, where they killed animals for eating or walking in or sitting on. Indeed, the whole of Slaughter House was filled with leather furniture and nobody had really noticed the significance of this. It was perhaps instinctive that the place was also full of white roses to welcome visitors. Red roses were not appropriate, in the circumstances, but nobody ever really understood why. It was all undercurrents. A bit like the causes that underlay historical events, human interaction, Politics.

The younger Slaughters were unaware of these things. They just played games on their computers, little realising they could easily have looked up Wikipedia to explain the complicated events of the past. Like all modern people, they simply lived on the surface of things - skimming over a lake of time that would soon melt through global warming.

At night, they slept too well to hear the animals screeching in the cellar. The clunk of axe through neck-bone. The squealing of pigs. The honking of gooseflesh. They slept too well, too easy with life. The slaughterhouse reeked of dead roses, lit by silent blinking computer-screens.