by Gene Stone
Then she turned around and saw all the animals, their eyes shut, their mouths open, their breathing regular and calm, all of them dreaming of far-off places they would forget in the morning. They looked so vulnerable, innocent as the human girl. The thought struck her hard: These animals were hers. Their dreams, their fates, their lives. They trusted her to lead them. Had she been any different than the humans? How? She’d focused on what the circus had done to her; she’d thought only of her hurt. But the circus had pained them all, and through that pain they had formed a bond. She’d ignored that, and she’d wasted the responsibility they had placed in her.
“It’s harder than we all imagined, isn’t it?” she heard a voice say.
Nancy turned.
The tiger jumped down from a tree. He knew what was in her mind. It had been in his too.
Nancy smiled.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
They sat together, silently, thinking about all that was wrong, all that was so very wrong with the world, and all that had to be done.
“No more hiding,” he said. Nancy knew what he meant. They weren’t so different, she thought.
“Anyway, you were right after all.”
“About what?”
“About heading west. It’s one thing to beat a few coyotes and peccaries. I wonder how the humans will stack up against a Bengal tiger and an African elephant?”
“I’m tired of wondering,” Nancy said. “Of trying to solve this riddle.”
“Being human is exhausting,” the tiger said.
Nancy nodded. “No wonder they pair up.”
They stared into the dark, momentarily lost in their thoughts.
“West, you say?” Nancy asked.
“Yes. Let’s go west.”
“To fight?”
“To fight the people who need to be fought against,” the tiger said.
“And leave the rest alone,” Nancy said.
“That,” the tiger said, “is a good idea.”
And then the canopy of stars and the full moon and the trickle of water and the beasts of north Texas were exactly where they were supposed to be.
Pig
323 was navigating the confusing expanse of the farm. Was awareness some form of madness, where the insanity manifested in subtle forms of trickery, pulling her this way, then that way, her mind full of ghosts and bones and dreams—all of which left her feeling split and exhausted? She’d been aware for less than one day and she was ready to surrender.
The other pigs were asleep. 323 could hear grunts and snores from all corners of the landscape as her former pen-mates stretched their legs out for the first time in their lives. Why couldn’t she do the same?
The ferret walked alongside her. He also zigzagged, tripped, raced ahead, and walked right into her. He sang softly to himself: “Da-da-da, de-de-de, dum-de-dum-dum da.”
“Where are you taking me?” 323 asked, out of breath. The ferret was wayward, but swift.
“To where it all begins.”
“What does that mean? I’m tired. I don’t understand the point of anything.”
“It will all mean more once you see.”
“Ferret. Quit speaking in riddles.”
The ferret eyed her curiously. “You know, I’m new at words too. I’m new at knowing what the right thing to say or do is. I’m trying.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing,” 323 said. “I just don’t know what the point is. You said it earlier. They’re going to win. I didn’t want to believe it when you said it, but I do now, and frankly, I don’t care. Even if we won, what sort of victory would it be? I’m a pig. What spoils can I hope for?”
The ferret looked up at 323. His face possessed a softness that 323 hadn’t seen before.
“This is why I need to show you. I’m not good for anything. But the odd thing is, you are. I don’t know why I know that.” He scratched behind his ear. “The awareness floods our minds. But it doesn’t change who any of us really are. And maybe...”
He scratched his ear again.
“Maybe?” 323 asked.
“Maybe, because of who you are—”
“Who I am? I’m a pig. Nothing more.”
“I think you’re more than that. Haven’t you noticed that the other pigs began to listen to you almost as soon as you opened your mouth? The awareness didn’t make you a great pig. It helped make the others recognize it. But there’s more you need to know, to fully understand where you’ve been, and maybe, where you’ll go. Me, I don’t care anymore. But you—you will always care. You can’t help it.”
“I don’t want to know more. And I don’t want to care any more. It’s been too much already,” 323 protested.
But the ferret had already walked on and 323, without thinking, lumbered after him, still taking in the sights and sounds of the new world. Some of it was intoxicating, some of it too new to understand. And then there was that odd smell from the house, the smell that had made her stomach unhappy, that now seemed to be emanating from the ferret. It must be his drink, she thought.
The ferret led 323 along a concrete walk that eventually turned to a dirt path, lined with weeds and tufts of yellow grass and decayed flowers.
They were approaching another building. 323 could just make it out; it jutted up into the darkness, as large as her pen. The ferret slowed down his pace, much to 323’s relief.
“This is it,” he said, scratching that same itch behind his ears. Then he burped, covering his mouth with his dirty paw. “Sorry.”
“What?” 323 asked.
“For that noise.”
“No, I mean, what is this?”
“This is it.” There was nothing extraordinary about the building at the surface. Still, something about it made her uneasy.
“I don’t want to go in there.” She backed off.
“But we must. We must go in there.” The ferret circled her, as if in an effort to contain her.
“No, ferret. I’m done with this game. And that’s what it is, a game. I don’t care to win and I don’t care to lose. One day has been enough.”
The ferret’s face fell. He sat down on the hard ground. “If there was ever time for a drink.”
323 sat down beside him. She noticed that smell again.
“Why do you drink?”
“Well, it’s only been for a day,” the ferret said with a wry smile.
“I doubt it’ll be just for today,” 323 said.
“Yes, yes. This awareness is tricky. Some of us seem to have gotten more of it than others. Nature is never fair. I would just as soon give mine back.” He paused. “And that’s why I drink and you don’t. Because I’m different.”
“Of course you are,” said 323, placating the small animal.
“No, no. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m different.”
323 looked up at the moon and the stars and the dark spaces between them.
“I don’t understand you, ferret.”
“No one does. That’s what I keep telling myself and it makes me feel better. It almost makes me happy. To be misunderstood. To be alone in the barn thinking about the boy who never loved me.” The ferret stopped. He, too, watched the cinema of the night sky.
“It won’t ever get old,” he said.
“What?”
“Being able to put into words what the sky looks like. Dark and light and shining and empty all at once.”
323 thought of herself standing in the silver halo of the human’s gilt mirror. She shuddered.
“So, pig, what makes you different?” the ferret asked.
“I don’t know. I became aware quickly. More quickly that the others. Or maybe I was always aware, and I just didn’t know it. Maybe we all were. Maybe there’s an awareness of awareness that has to come before awareness. Maybe...” But her words were twisting in her head and she couldn’t finish her thought.
“Hmm. I could really use my thimble now,” the ferret said, half to the pig, half to himself. “I’ll go get it. Soon. But come o
n, we have work to do.”
323 followed him to the building. In the dull light, she could see it was more like the barn than anything else. It seemed to have two stories but no windows, and its front door looked similar to the entrance to the pen.
“We have to get inside,” the ferret said.
“Why would I want to get into another building? I don’t care, ferret. I keep trying to tell you. I don’t care.”
The ferret laughed. “Let’s just enter the building, then you can not care.”
He sniffed around the perimeter of the building. “The door’s locked, but maybe there’s another way in.”
“I’m going to go,” 323 said. “I’m tired, ferret, and I want to sleep.” She wanted to add “forever,” but she stopped herself.
Just then, a deafening blast shook the land. Subsidiary coughs and hiccups followed the initial explosion.
323 and the ferret turned. From where they stood, they could see the human house lit up like an orange star, flames stretching from the windows, smoke waffling through the air, masking the previous stench with a new, decadent odor. Embers filtered through the darkness.
“I was in that house. Minutes ago.” Shock reverberated through the pig. She could imagine the burning pictures, the burning mirror.
“So was I.”
The ferret moved close. He and 323 watched the house burn down. They didn’t speak.
“How did that happen?” 323 finally asked. “How, ferret? Are the humans back? Could they smell us in their domain? Are the other pigs safe? I have to go check on them.”
The ferret smiled. “That is why I brought you here, 323.”
The smell.
“What?” she said, distracted.
“Because you broke out of a jail, you walked through a graveyard, you escaped a house doomed for explosion, and here you are, worrying about something other than yourself.”
“What’s the smell, ferret? I smell something on your paws.”
The ferret looked down at his feet. “Odd,” he said. Then he looked back at the house. Small patches of fire started flickered up in their direction.
“It’s kerosene, 323. Humans use it to burn things. I used it to burn things that were human.”
“You did that?” 323 looked at the house.
“Yes,” he said. “The house had to be destroyed. I had to do it.”
323 didn’t have time to argue. “This stuff is on your paws,” she said. “I can smell it. You tracked it here. It’s following us.”
“That can’t be.”
“It is,” said the pig. “It is.” She looked back at the trail of fire. “We have to hurry, 323. Come, come now.”
He scampered up and resumed looking for an entrance. 323 followed. The fire was spreading, from the house, through the grass, toward them.
“We have to get in there, 323. We have to. The fire has to stop. It wasn’t supposed to come this way.”
He’s losing his mind, 323 thought.
“323, we have to get in.”
“Why? Who cares if the building burns? It’s a human building.”
“No. It’s not. Not inside.”
The ferret ran to the front entrance. 323 followed.
She could smell something other than the kerosene here, a familiar scent.
“Ferret, are there pigs in there?”
“Pigs,” the ferret said. “Pigs the humans left behind to die. Just like you. Pigs and pigs and pigs. But not like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are pigs and there are pigs,” the ferret said. “You’ll see. Just get in there.” He was taking quick breaths. “You’re the only one who can save them. The humans left them to starve. You can bring them to life.”
323 stepped back. She took a deep breath. If the ferret was right, and she suspected that he was, then she had to get in there. She couldn’t let any other pig, any other mammal for that matter, suffer behind more closed, locked doors. She ran at full speed toward the door, ramming into it as hard as she could. Upon contact, she reeled backward and thudded to the ground.
She hadn’t made a dent. She picked herself up and tried again.
Nothing.
Each time, after the pain in her shoulder receded, she turned, and each time, the fire was closer, its orange and yellow hues spilling forward, seeping closer. She listened for the pigs inside, for any sign other than the scent, but heard nothing.
Only the cheers of the ferret kept her charging. Again and again and again, she threw her weight into the door. After each defeat, she picked herself up.
The ferret was jittery, talking to himself, cursing the air.
On her eighth attempt, the door cracked. Her shoulders throbbed with the blushing softness of a fresh bruise. She didn’t care. She was inside. The ferret was close behind her.
She squealed in victory.
“I knew you could do it,” he said.
She barely heard him. She was still focused on the door, reveling silently as she stared down at the jagged wood and the loose copper bolts. But her victory over the door was short-lived.
She looked up and saw cages. Cages and cages. A large pen filled with nothing but iron cages barely bigger than the pigs they held.
A room of pigs in cages.
She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to see. She closed her eyes and thought of the fake life that had seemed so real in the mirror, a mirror that was now cracked and burning quicksilver, reflecting nothing. Everything was shattered or burning. 323 shrank down. Maybe if she kept her eyes shut, she could imagine it all away and shrink into a dark womb of her own making.
“We are running out of time,” the ferret said.
“We?” 323 bellowed. “We?” She was breathing hard. She opened her eyes and took in the room once more. Inside the cages, grotesquely large pigs with swollen teats opened their mouths, drool draining off of their jowls. 323 went up to one of these pigs and rubbed her head against its exposed belly. The pig jumped, shocked by the sensation of skin on skin. The pig tried to lift her head, but couldn’t.
323 began whispering to the pig. They were okay, she repeated, they would be okay. As she spoke, she studied the cages, seeking some weakness. How could she get in? And how would she get the pigs out?
She scanned the locks. She jiggled them with her nose. Then, she let her eyes roam the large room. There were at least twenty more cages, at least twenty more pigs, lost to lethargy inside their locked worlds.
She turned and looked outside.
“Can we stop the fire?” she asked the ferret, though of course she knew the answer.
“No,” he said.
“I can’t get into these locks. And the cages are made of steel. I can’t just knock them down like the door.”
“Keys,” said the ferret. “There must be keys. I remember the boy used keys to lock his bicycle. They open things. Keys.”
“Go and find them then. In a shed maybe?”
The ferret nodded and ran off into the blazing night.
The fire was coming closer.
323 turned back, nudging the pig again. The pig moaned, a low, guttural sound that reverberated through the dirt floor.
“I’m here,” 323 said.
The pig’s eyes shone like onyx discs in the vague light of the impending flames. She blinked. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.
“Are you aware?”
“Yes,” the pig said, finally. She lifted her head, then dropped it, letting out another low groan.
“I’m here. Do you need water?”
“No,” the pig said. “Let us die.”
“Why are you in here? Why haven’t I seen you in the pen?”
The pig snorted out a painful, unhappy laugh.
“You have seen me.”
“I haven’t.”
“Put your snout through the slats. Feel my belly again.”
This sentence, with its many words, tired the pig. She was short of breath.
323 did as th
e other pig asked. The belly was tight, swollen.
“Your belly. It’s heavy with offspring.”
“This is what I do.”
She felt herself nodding at the pig’s words. She understood. She looked around. Every pig in every cage was bloated with progeny.
“We are due to deliver soon. It would be better for the piglets if we just die first. All of you are our children. No one knows who’s the mother of whom. We give birth, and then we give birth again. I could be your mother. I could be anyone’s mother.”
Again, the pig moaned. This time the sound was so deep that dust from the floor floated up into the fluorescence of the fiery sky.
323 looked around in desperation. She had to free these pigs. She attacked one of the locks with her teeth. But the metal didn’t give. Where was the ferret? She called out to him. He was looking for keys, she remembered. She had little faith he would find them. But it seemed to be their only hope.
The pigs in the cages felt the fire approaching. But their spirits were too broken to care. Besides, 323 thought, what could they do?
“Think,” 323 said to herself. Think. She looked around, and around, until she’d made herself dizzy.
Think. Let the awareness in. Think. She closed her eyes.
She opened them. The cages were locked, yes, but each was locked by a single connecting tube—a copper tube that journeyed from one end of the barn to the other. Why was that? What did that copper tube do?
She closed her eyes again. Think.
Electricity! The word was new to her, but like so many others, she grasped it. She rolled it around in her mind until the concept was clear. Was this tube electric? If so, how to make it non-electric? She didn’t know. She followed the tube to the end of the room. There it connected to machinery.
The fire was getting closer.
No, the tube wasn’t electric. It was a pump of some sort. It was air pressure. Pistons at the end. Copper tubing with brass fittings at each section. If she could puncture the tubing, she could release the air pressure. And the locks would open. Wouldn’t they?
But how? How could she do this?
“Think,” she said to herself again. Think. She tried biting the tube, but her teeth weren’t strong enough to pierce it.
She could feel the fire coming closer. The night was beginning to warm into a kind of day, the sky glowing orange. The other pigs could see it. But they didn’t care.