Three
My mom sent Newton a package of smoked pigs’ ears for Christmas. He ate the last today, and he loved them all of course, crackling and devouring each in just a few minutes.
Except for dust, we don’t have dead flesh in our house; it was disconcerting to have these ears. They were a deep ochre in color, and veins were still visible in them. One of the ears even had traces of some sort of tattoo or brand or other mark used to identify the pig before it went to slaughter.
But what was most disconcerting about the gift was the packaging and how it announced that the ears were acquired, not by deliberately slicing them from a pig’s carcass, but by randomly grabbing them from what I imagine was a large pile of ears on a slaughterhouse floor. How did the packaging do this? Simply: it had three ears in it.
