Heads you lose ...

Elizabethan manor kitchen, October afternoon, windowless stone chamber thick with peat smoke and tallow stink. A young servant woman—perhaps sixteen, forearms corded from kneading—has just swung a heavy cleaver through a mallard's neck. The body still convulses in her left hand, arterial spray across her apron's previous stains. Blood pools in the scored oak block, mixes with onion scraps. Around her, the kitchen's brutal choreography: a boy turns the spit, grease fires licking his wrists; an older woman shells peas with thumb-ruined efficiency, never looking up; someone scrapes a cauldron's burnt bottom. The duck's head, eyes filmed, rolls toward a sack of barley. Her face shows nothing—neither horror nor satisfaction, simply the next task in a sequence without end. No windows for the soul here. Just hunger, and the labor of feeding it.