Though she’s away her house is right over there. I can see it. In this working class neighborhood there is no privacy but mostly there is no one. I wonder if I need a fence, an old orange one but my dog and even I would miss this absence of activity—the scant moves of a cat, a truck collects trash in the alley and the occasional almost jarring from across the fence hello.

But this one who is gone for the holidays, my friend, is the one who told me about the roll of beef you can get at the supermarket that is really good meat though cheap. It’s a local beef company, they slaughter animals here and the tube of meat makes me think of that because it sheds a lot of blood.

Once when I had no kitchen I went to the thrift store and bought a George Foreman grill which was named after a boxer who made a fortune on this product. I recall my sister’s enthusiasm for making burgers this way many years ago in Massachusetts in her home with her wife. We don’t speak since my mother died though it makes no difference to me. My sister was mean so to my mind she’s like a million tiny bugs flying everywhere. I could probably talk to my sister by that means. Step into a cloud of my sister or even my mother. Are you there? She is.

But when I throw the bloody patty down and drop the lid and hear it sizzle I can also potentially go Sis. You have to spray a little oil on both of George’s trays (upper and lower) and the grease from the meat dribbles out the front leaving a paste that is sort of fun to wipe up it’s so thick. There’s nothing like it. The cleaning process for George is very special. You unplug and while it’s cooling you put damp paper towels on both trays—or I think of them as jaws in fact.

They receive the cold dead meat of the cow, the ground life of the cow, bloody animal flesh dropping onto the grooved lower and when you shut it upper jaw. You don’t exactly wait but some time passes. During which I relish these numerous opportunities to say hello to my sister through an appliance. Not a phone but a jaw full of meat. And teeming around my head are the tiny bugs of my mother’s existence. Never really gone. She’s like lace.

Later on when I’m not even thinking about it (after I eat) I step up. It’s my preferred relation to labor. I approach work as if it were a dream. I arrive on it seemingly randomly like my canoe makes contact with land. I open the lid and the grease has made the paper towels brown wet and greasy. Like a Helen Frankenthaler. Why do I like this so much. I have no love of cleaning, maybe a little bit of joy in dusting. That time and environment casually blow in and appear on every ledge within about a week but since I come and go it’s generally months. I make the mark of the now by vanquishing that stuff. And I look at each shorn lamp and I feel proud.

But when cleaning George I feel like a dentist. Because the pleasure is because it is so gross. Are people drawn to this profession because they enjoy their own anger and this pedestal for berating everyone for being piggish about the most important thing their mouth. I am in George’s mouth now. The main grooves of the grill are easy you pull it (the grease) down with the paper towel then you get another one and then another. I think part of the pleasure is that there is so much. It’s the fat of the animal cooperating in death, in burning and melting, enabling its own flesh to be whisked right off the grill. The edges are almost more important. You use the edge of your finger, like your nail, still draped in a paper towel and you draw. You draw your nail down and around tracing the curve of George’s mouth. Don’t forget the top, it’s easy. The top jaw is strangely a little more difficult. It burns and creates hard little piles—with your fingernail you really need to scrub. It’s a little feverish now. Almost done. You probably wiped the counter under George first but it’s still greasy. George is drooling. The top of the lower jaw is wide. It’s a pleasure to wipe in a larger arena, one that could easily be forgotten. Does the good dentist have fun, the nice dentist who’s going to town, is it easy for them. When they are deep in your mouth is it possible the happy one is equally excited as the grouchy one. All of them like to get inside your body and clean. In this opening—really to your skeleton, this hole, your mouth. Wide open and awful, welcoming the world and the world clings to it and some of us do a little bit of preliminary work, so their job is not as formidable, but it always is worse than we think because even the good ones have stuff, trapped, and blood comes and they howl and you the dentist go tsk, tsk, tsk. This is so gross I could just pull them all out. They think that sometimes. Pleasurably. Each little bone pillow green and brown and gross, eating and chewing the animal, whatever goes in. Devouring the world ambitiously, til they themselves are dead.

The dentist works in the live pit of horrors, the slaughterhouse of the bourgeois individual, juices, blood pours now that they’ve had their fill and you’ve had yours. And the dentist even has the power to close it. The work is complete and for god’s sake keep it shut for an hour or two they say. No hot drinks. No food. They’re all a little mean. They’re keeping it clean. It’s a grave. ♦

"The Undertaking" is an excerpt from Myles's novel in progress, All My Loves.