My Job/Career/Profession

I work in a fish cannery. It’s not a pleasant business, though better than being in a slaughterhouse, but it pays. Not well, mind you, but it does pay. Fishermen bring in the fish, we clean em, they go down on a long belt into the "cutting shed", the name speaks for itself. We in the shed wear aprons and strange bonnets, and chop and flay the fish into tiny pieces to be squashed into cans. I often cut my hands on the knife, and I come in after long shifts with lots of little bleeding sores all over by fingers, wrapped in gauze or bits of cloth. During the summer it gets brutally hot, and the smell of the fish is overwhelming. I can barely breath. Sometimes...it rots, and sometimes still we put it in anyway. But I just keep going. It’s the only thing I can do. I wish I was out there actually bringing in the fish, as a Nord should, as my father before me did. Even with my hands pruned by the juices from wish, bloodied from metal tins, my eyes burning, my muscles aching, I still feel connected to sea working here in a dark metal hull somewhere in the heart of this city.
The thing is, though, they don’t know I’m a woman. There are other women there, sure, but they don't acknowledge me. It’s not that I’m not developed or shapely, it’s that I wear so many layers of clothes, am so brooding and speak so gruffly that they can’t see it. The only one who sees it is Shaw. After a long day of work I come home, and he never ceases to be amazed by the transformation. And even though I smell like fish and hurt everywhere, and even though he smells just as bad from cutting sheets of metal in some god forsaken factory we still enjoy each other’s company and sleep soundly next to one another. We don’t have the money to get married, and I don’t really feel the need to anyway, not with the wages we make. The cost of living combined with the money I send home leaves us little for leisure.