"You are strange," the housewife said.  She nodded once, the creased fat of her neck swinging definitively.  "Still, you do a good job."

She handed me a leather bag.

I hefted it and the number and weight of the coins felt right, so I nodded with a third of a smile and raised a hand in farewell. 

"Be well," she said, and followed her farmhand out the door.  "Mind you don't drop the Brühwurst."

I wiped off my hands and walked back to the empty hanging room.  No new customers in eight days . . . hunger rumbled, but most people wanted their animals killed in the autumn and early winter.  I continued through the cool hanging room to the warm back lean-to, where my last bit of business awaited finishing up: a young calf with a canker had been divvied up and smoked, and was waiting in three piles to be packaged in linen.  My expertise in curing, smoking and salting, long practiced, was the main reason I got any summer business at all: people came to me when they had ill animals which needed to be killed quickly if their flesh was to be of any use at all.  During the long winter months, when business was non-existent, I would use the money I saved during butchering season to buy chickens, old horses, the occasional dog . . .

Of course, just as I cleared a space and found a rhythm of weighing and piling, someone knocked on the front door.  I half-consciously wiped my salty hands on my apron.  I hoped that it wasn't the owner of the calf.  The man was dangerously bullnecked and in an awful hurry, but by rights I had needed to take care of the farmwife's pig first as it was the first to have been brought to my shop.

I opened the door and blinked.  The girl at the door was beautiful, with a graceful white neck framed by sandy blond curls.  I looked at the curve of her throat above her linen collar for only a brief moment before turning my attention to the animal at her side: a large goat.  It, too, had a graceful white neck.

"She's passing blood in her milk," the girl said.  The goat wobbled a bit. "Father said she won't get better.  He wants sausages and jerky."  The girl pouted a bit.  "I like her."

"I'll take good care of her," I said.  "Your father will be happy with his sausages."

She looked down, then handed the goat's collar to me and curtsied prettily. She looked up at me through her eyelashes, then turned her face away, once more exposing that beautiful neck.

"You are a very nice man," she purred softly.  "And you run a good shop, from what I've heard."

"The meat should be cured and ready within four days," I said.  I bowed low, drew the goat inside, and closed the door.  I knew that my' mysterious' gray eyes and 'regal' cheekbones made it difficult for young ladies not to flirt with me, but in so doing their unconscious body language wound up causing me a different sort of quandary than they intended.  Ah well, the girl would be back, but when she returned I would be in a much more safe frame of mind.

The goat was certainly petted; it followed me trustingly, nose to my pocket.  I led it directly to the hanging room, removed the bludgeon from its hook on the wall as I passed, and struck a sharp blow right where the skull met the neck when the goat was close enough to the hooks that I wouldn't have to drag it far.  Two practiced stabs and twists of my sharp knife had suitable openings in the hocks; I put the two small flesh-hooks through the holes and pulled the rope to hoist the old goat off the ground. Kneeling by its dangling throat, I cast one last longing glance of my mind's eye back to the goat's mistress.  I then said a prayer for forgiveness and tacked on a blessing for my meal before saying "amen," cradling the goat's forehead against my palm, and incising its carotid artery with a practiced twist of my left eye tooth.