Pigs - Johanna Stoberock

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said.

      “Couldn’t,” Andrew said. “It was the kind of dream where you’re swimming, and you can’t get to the surface of the water. Or where you’re eating, but you can’t get the fork to your mouth. I was trying to wake up, but I just couldn’t do it.”

      It was dark, then. The sun had finally set beyond the water. The whole sky had glowed orange, and then pink, and then soft purple with the red sun at the center, an eye dropping below its lid. It was the same boring beautiful sunset that happened every night. Music drifted from the grownups’ place. Dance music, with clarinets and an occasional trumpet. They could hear laughter. They could hear the whoops and cries of spinning on the dance floor. When the children lay down, they fell asleep to the sounds of a party. They dreamed that they were lying in bed upstairs in an old fashioned house while their parents had friends over below, and that, if they could just climb out of bed to sit on the stairs, they would be positioned to sneak their heads around the corner and see them, the grown-ups in all their glamour—dancing, laughing, drinking, flirting, beautiful in the living room. But the sheets were soft and the pillows softer, and even in their dreams, they couldn’t rise to see what it was they most desired to see.

      Luisa crept out of the hut in the middle of the night and wandered through the dark to the pen. She knew the path by feel. In the dark, she moved slowly enough that she didn’t stumble over roots and stones. The moon was almost full, and the path and the ocean both shimmered under its silver light. The pigs were asleep. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear their soft breathing somewhere beyond the reedy brush that filled the pen. Given their size, it was amazing how they sometimes emerged so suddenly from the tall grass, invisible one minute and looming over everything the next. One snorted in her sleep now, and another grumbled as if in answer. The rest of the island was silent except for the sound of the ocean. Back and forth. Crash and retreat. It was impossible to imagine the world without that constant sound.

      She had a pair of glasses in her pocket. She curled her fingers around them and bit her lip. They’d slipped from a corner of the net that afternoon while she and Mimi were hauling nuclear waste, and she’d used her foot to scoot them to the side and gone back for them while the pigs were eating. She shouldn’t have done it. Not after the disaster with Eddie. Anything that comes ashore goes to the pigs immediately, they’d decided when they woke in the net with her brother missing and severed rope in his place. Anything that we keep gets taken away. Better to feed it to the pigs first than have it taken away by some other means. Better to surrender voluntarily.

      But the glasses. She knew she didn’t see as well as the other kids, but she didn’t know quite how bad it was until she went for a little walk with the glasses in her pocket. As soon as she was out of sight, she put them on. The world changed abruptly.

      She’d always thought that leaves on trees formed a kind of web that moved like yards of fabric in the breeze. She’d thought birds were just gestures of movement, dark shapes in the sky and then gone. The world through the glasses wasn’t that way at all. Everything had its own crisp outline. The trees weren’t covered with a soft mass; they were covered with thousands of individual sharp-edged leaves that pressed against each other and shook when the breeze off the ocean hit them and turned upwards when it rained. She saw a bird sitting on the branch of a tree. She saw it tilt its head, spread its wings, fly up into the air, land on a different tree, and sit there without moving.

      She felt like she was eating the world, staring at it through those glasses—tree bark with its mottled browns and grays, small rocks at the beach worn smooth and flat and just the right size to fit in the palm of her hand, the pan they used for cooking fish that was burned black on its bottom and rusted orange at its top. She felt like she could gobble up every object with her eyes. She hadn’t realized she was so hungry. Why couldn’t the world be clear like this forever? A kind of unformed anger at what she’d been missing surged into her throat, and as much as she tried to swallow, she couldn’t get it to unstick.

      It was obvious why the glasses had been thrown away. The left temple was missing and the lenses were scratched. But given what they could do, why would anyone ever give them up? It was hard to imagine a world where they weren’t the most precious thing a person could own. She formed her left hand into a fist and banged it against her thigh. She loved the world through her new eyes. She wanted to see that world forever.

      Once, watching the pigs walk toward her through the tall grass, her vision had blurred to such a degree that she’d thought she’d seen six tall women walking toward her instead of six giant pigs. The women were carrying spears and shields, and she thought they were coming to hunt her. She couldn’t move. All she could do was stare. And empty her pockets. She’d been carrying some stones she’d found. One of them was pink and had a white line running through it. She cast the stones into the pen and whispered about how sorry she was that she’d kept anything for herself. “They’re yours,” she’d whispered. “I promise. I’ll give everything to you.” The women kept coming closer and closer, light flashing on their shields, but as soon as they got to the fence she’d scrunched her eyes. The pigs had been clearly pigs again, and she’d thrown everything she loved to them ever since.

      Now, at the pigpen, she thought the night would be clear to everyone but her. She banged her left fist against her thigh again, just like she’d done that afternoon. She wanted to take that fist and bang it into something hard. She didn’t think the pigs would even like eating lenses, and the glasses were so small, anyway; she didn’t think the pigs would even notice them once they got them in their mouths. But rules are rules. She sighed. She hit her thigh. She knew where the glasses needed to go.

      Still, she was slow about dropping them in. She dangled them over the fence. Sometimes Luisa called, “Here piggy, piggy,” when she held out food, but not that night. She just held her hand out and shut her eyes. From a distance, her face looked old with anger and disappointment.

      The spotted pig woke up and heaved herself to standing. She shambled over, sleepy but ready for a snack. The shipment of nuclear waste had been harder to finish than expected, and the pigs had stayed up late eating the last of it. Her sides bulged out, and she had a peculiar glow about her as she shuffled through the brush. The rest of the pigs kept sleeping. It was just about midnight, and the moon sent shadows through the leaves onto her back. On the island in the dry heat of day, shadows were what the pigs had to stay cool instead of mud. But shadows gave them something else, too. They gave them the beauty of dappled light, of its patterns through the leaves. Some people say that humans are the only beasts moved by beauty, but the pigs proved them wrong on a daily basis. The pigs never failed to stop to appreciate the lacework of light through leaves. They appreciated the perfection of a beehive. The smooth gold of honey moved them just as much as the sweetness of its flavor. The pigs admired beauty as much as any of us do.

      Luisa wasn’t looking when the pig jumped and bit her pointer finger off. Its teeth were so sharp that the bite didn’t hurt. She turned, and saw the glasses gone, and felt a deep regret for the clarity of her vision before she realized that she’d lost something else. The pig lumbered away, settling back down among her sisters. Luisa stared at the new stump which was just now beginning to well with blood. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t quite place what it was. Oh, blood. Oh, another finger. Was this enough to cover the loss she felt? She crammed her skirt around the stump and set off slowly back to the hut, the fuzziness of the world revealed now as flaw, any hope for clarity ground up and buried deep in the spotted pig’s stomach.

      Otis started the fire with the glass from his locket. He used the nail from the crate to pop the glass from its frame. The photos inside slid out and landed on the ground. He hung the chain back around his neck and felt the empty locket against his skin and held the freed glass up to the sun. The sun concentrated through it onto a leaf, and before long the leaf smoked and then burst into flame. He couldn’t believe it worked: the glass, the warmth, the heat, the wisp of smoke, the finger of flame. Who said he couldn’t work miracles? He was so amazed that it took him a second too long to bend his head down and start blowing, and he lost the flame and had to start all over. This time he blew gently, his cheek wedged in the sand, and the flame blazed stronger. He fed it with the tiniest sticks he could find—he had a whole pile of thin twigs next to his left

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