A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

by DeAnna Knippling

  The pigs were talking again, but it sounded different.

  Normally, at night, they were all outside, and on a moonlit night, you could see them sigh in their sleep: a big inhale, a sudden exhale. They would snort and mumble and shift around, like little kids who didn’t want to go to sleep. Some of them would stand at their food trough all night, as far as I could tell, just so they could be first when Uncle Chuck came to feed them in the morning.

  That night, they weren’t. I could hear them, mostly making soft, repeating snorts, like the chuffing of the clock, except sometimes I could hear a long sigh, too.

  I walked on the packed dirt between the metal wire of the smaller pens to the door of the first barn. The door was shut, but not latched.

  I grabbed onto the handle with both hands, which was not as cold as I’d expected, and jerked on it, but it was too heavy for me. The door was one of those big sliding affairs, and the bottom dragged in the dirt, and I was seven or eight or ten or whatever.

  I took a deep breath, held it, and jerked on the handle with all my strength. My breath came out of me in a grunt. The door barely twitched; it shifted a little in its track, maybe half an inch, then rolled back into the wall of the barn with a clonk.

  The pigs went silent again.

  I heard footsteps coming closer to the door, dragging through straw.

  “Uncle Chuck? Is that you? Are you okay?” I leaned my head on the door, which, too, wasn’t as cold as I’d been expecting it to be. “You haven’t been eaten, have you?”

  Something heavy thumped into the door, and the bottom of it slid out a couple of inches. I jumped back. From the bottom crack of the door, a pig’s nose stuck out, pale pink. That side of the barn was in shadow, but I remember the nose being touched by moonlight anyway, the hairs of it sparkling. That was probably another memory, from another night. But that’s how I remember it.

  The nose sniffed, the edges of it curling and twitching.

  The pig grunted, it sounded like a question.

  “Uncle Chuck?” I said. “Are you in there?”

  The pig kept sniffing around. I started to cry.

  Back then, I would cry over everything. I would cry over anything. People would make fun of me for being a crybaby. To this day, I can’t cry without feeling like I’ve made a fool of myself. Even at funerals, with cold eyes looking at me, as if to say that if I believed in heaven more, I’d cry less, and tears made me a sinner. I do still cry, though, no matter how much I wish that I didn’t have to, that people and sadness couldn’t make me.

  The pig grunted again and slammed into the door, which bounced outward, caught on a rock, and stuck open at the bottom. Not much, but maybe just enough for a little kid like me to get through.

  That was the second miracle.

  The pig’s nose reappeared for a second, and grunted a question at me.

  I took step by shivering step toward the door.

  The closer I got, the worse it smelled.

  I had never wanted to cover up my nose like some stupid town kid before, but I wanted to then. I didn’t. I didn’t want to be rude.

  And then I was on my hands and knees in the dirt, crawling through the hole of the pushed-out door. The dirt went from dry and cracked into sharp pieces on the outside, to a line of wet mud that I knew was full of pig shit, to clean straw. Clean-ish. Cleaner than I expected. Pieces of it were still gold-colored. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before, but the lights were on. I should have seen the glow through the windows, which were only green, corrugated plastic that matched the silver corrugated walls of the pig barns, that let in a glow of light but nothing to look at, that were so dirty anyway that you probably wouldn’t have noticed whether it was day or night, if you were a pig. But I never really noticed anything, back then. I still have this idea that I can’t. Notice things, that is. But what it is, is that I don’t notice the same things as other people. The things I notice used to get a circle drawn in the air around somebody’s head: cuckoo. And the things I didn’t notice used to get a circle drawn in the air, too. But now I know, nobody notices everything.

  I’m the only one who noticed when the pigs stopped talking. And that wasn’t cuckoo at all.

  I finished scooting through the crack, with my nightgown getting drug all through the dirt and the mud and the straw and doing nothing but getting caught under my knees as I tried to crawl forward, and got to my feet like a little kid, both hands on the floor until I had my feet under me. Then I brushed off the front of my nightgown like a fool. It wasn’t coming clean; imagine that. I think I smeared more on from my hands than I scraped off.

  My guts were in knots. Luckily, my nose was already numb by that point. The smell was so bad that it was fading and leaving tingling behind. I didn’t want to look up, so I brushed the front of my nightgown again, pointlessly. I knew I had to stop, I knew I had to look up. I knew I couldn’t.

  I heard a soft grunt in front of me, and then the squealing of a younger pig, maybe even a piglet. Not in pain, but just yelling. Like it was saying, “No, no, no!” Like a little kid throwing a temper tantrum.

  To this day, I blame the parents when I hear a temper tantrum. Wherever I go, I hear kids pitching a fit, I blame the parents.

  You.

  I blame you.

  Did you forget what it was like to be a kid?

  That constant, raw pain?

  It’s you throwing the fit, but you’re throwing that fit by picking on your kid until they lose it.

  Really, what you want to have happen: your kids look at you one day, they could be six years old, they could be six days and still shitting themselves, and they say, “Wow, being a parent is hard, and I should be the one to make the compromise here.”

  Fuck that. Fuck that for a stinking pile of pig shit.

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a kid try to get their parents’ attention, get ignored, try a little harder, get ignored, try a little harder, get ignored…right up to the point where they break down and cry. And get yelled at, because they don’t understand why your fucking coffee selection is more important than they are.

  When you’re a kid and that happens, you think, this means they don’t love me anymore.

  Your heart breaks. You’re a kid. You don’t understand.

  That was the sound coming from that piglet.

  I looked up. I couldn’t help it.

  I closed my eyes before I could see, I could really see what was there, but it was too late. It was on the inside of my eyelids, burned in. It was spinning around in my head. It was there, and I couldn’t get it out, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it out, and it would be better to see it than to hope it would go away. Just like looking into the darkness under my brother’s little bed. It’s better to see what’s there than what you imagine.

  Uncle Chuck was on the floor of the pig barn. The pigs should have all been outside, or locked up in their pens, but they weren’t. Some of the gates were just standing open; others were twisted up and pushed out. Some of the latches had torn out of the wood; some of the big squares of wire had just been pulled up and out of the way.

  The pigs were surrounding him, mostly.

  Big ones, little ones. Their hair sparkled in the wire-cage lights overhead. Black hair on pink pigs, white hair on black pigs, all mixed up. I didn’t know them all—we weren’t allowed to hang around the pig barn too long—but I recognized the one who had let them in. He was standing next to me still. Pink, all over pink, with just a little bit of mud around his feet, and some in one long streak along his side, where he’d pushed open the door for me.

  My legs shook, and he leaned against them. I stumbled sideways for a second, then clomped back close to him, leaning into him as much as he leaned into me.

  The grunting started up again, I think from a big female who was laying on her side, toward the wall. Her side heaved, making her rows of nipples jiggle. It sounded just like she was crying.

  Uncle Chuck was in the middle of them
, in the middle of the floor. He was this big blue blur, from his overalls. One of the larger pigs was shoving a smaller one toward Uncle Chuck, and the little one didn’t want to go.

  Uncle Chuck’s skin was the color of a fresh-scrubbed pink pig; he wasn’t wearing a shirt or a jacket with his overalls. In the middle of the smears of blue and of pinkness were streaks of red.

  I took the backs of my hands and wiped them across my eyes. I was having trouble breathing. My body wasn’t remembering to breathe, so I had to do it, but I couldn’t seem to remember how to do it, either, so mostly my breath just jiggled back and forth in my lungs. Tears of snot started to run out the end of my nose. My face was wet, but I could only tell because tears were running off my chin and into the neck of my jacket, cold streaks going down my chest.

  I lowered my hands and sniffed hard about a thousand times, and the snot went down my throat.

  The older pig pushed the little one up to Uncle Chuck’s body, the little pig shaking its head the whole time, squealing louder and louder, so loud I thought it would wake up everybody in the house. But the older pig pushed it right up to Uncle Chuck’s body, to his shoulder, where there was a long smear of blood that was already starting to turn flaky and fall off around the edges, like mud off a boot.

  The pig beside me nudged me on the back of the knee, and I knew what it wanted.

  I…I walked forward, shuffling in those too-big boots.

  Uncle Chuck’s feet were bare; he’d walked out here in bare feet. Muddy.

  My eyes felt heavy, like I was going to fall asleep before I got there. I kept forgetting to breathe, then I’d gasp, and the smell would feel like a taste, a shitty taste. My mouth wouldn’t shut, but the sides of my jaw ached and ached and ached. I stumbled forward until I was next to the piglet, and I dropped to my knees, and I picked him up and hugged him to my chest.

  He went all the way across my chest, from one side to the other, and stuck out over the sides. His split hooves where sharp. He tried to run away, but I wouldn’t let go, and he scratched up the tops of my legs trying to escape. I leaned back so his feet would scrape mostly on the bottom of my coat instead of on my nightgown.

  After a while he settled down and buried his snout in the armpit of my coat, and I scratched his back. The hair got up under my chewed-off fingernails and hurt, but it felt good, too. I was crying, and he was grunting with me. He took his snout out from my armpit and put it up by my ear, sniffing me, and the edges of his snout curled around and under my ear. I pet him a few more times, then let him down.

  He stood next to me, shivering.

  I looked at Uncle Chuck, I guess really looked at him for the first time.

  His eyes were open. I know it couldn’t have been true, but the way I remember it, his eyes were black like beads, all the way across, with long black lashes over them, that curled just at the ends. His beard covered most of his face. Underneath it, though, his cheeks were white, just plain white, not pink or red like usual. White like a doll’s. I reached one hand past the little piglet and touched his cheek. It was warm, but it didn’t move right. You touched Uncle Chuck on the cheek, and he smiled. He looked at you and smiled.

  If you were sad, he picked you up and sat you on his knee and made fun of you and laughed with you and told you stupid jokes that weren’t even funny. If you were sad, he heard you. If you were mad, he heard you, he might tease you, he might roll his eyes at you, but he heard you.

  I brushed my hand across his beard. I didn’t want to say it, in case my little brother heard, but I knew that he was Santa, too. He’d put on a Santa outfit and put powered sugar in his beard and his hair and show up at the back door with a black plastic trash bag full of presents, and if you’d say, “But who’s bringing Uncle Chuck’s presents?” the rest of the adults would shush you, in the middle of the smells of spiced apple cider and chili and oyster stew, in the middle of eating too many piped cookies covered in sugar, in the middle of fighting with everyone over the olives stuck on the outside of the cheese logs.

  The pig that had been pushing the little one over to Uncle Chuck’s body sighed a long sigh, shook herself all over, and lay on the floor with her feet sticking out. I petted the little one again.

  Uncle Chuck was covered all over with bites, mostly on his arms, but one big one on his foot that left his little toe hanging sideways.

  I leaned over to Uncle Chuck’s face, with one hand on either side of his head, and kissed him on the cheek. His skin felt like someone had put wax all over it, like a candle. Or—cold grease. Cold lard.

  He smelled like pigs.

  Not like pig shit. Like pigs, like the warm skin of them, but going cold.

  I couldn’t bite him, not like the pigs had. I didn’t have the right teeth. I didn’t have the right kind of heart.

  The little pig next to me, still shivering, took two shaky steps closer to Uncle Chuck and nipped him on the arm, not a whole-hearted bite, just a little nip. And then he ran, squealing, back into one of the pens that had the wire all bent out of shape.

  My eyes were flooded over again; I couldn’t see. But I knew that…I knew, I didn’t want to know. I stood up. Uncle Chuck didn’t.

  The pig who had let me in grunted a question at me, and I answered it like he could understand exactly what I was saying.

  “They’re going to kill you. You gotta get out of here.”

  I went over to the door and grabbed onto the inside handle, hoping that it would work better from the inside, but it didn’t. I jerked and shoved on that door, my feet slipping in the straw, the door rocking but not moving anywhere. I just wasn’t strong enough. And there wasn’t anybody I could trust to help me, either.

  And then I remembered the side door.

  The side doors were where the people were supposed to go in and out of the pig barns. Pigs through the big doors, people through the sliding doors. But Uncle Chuck never used them, so I never thought about it, except in the sense of whether or not I could sneak through them, like a spy.

  I found the door. You went through a gap between the pens to a cement ramp that led down from the human area to the pig area, or maybe up from the pig area to the human area, which was maybe only a couple of feet higher, but there it was, and there was the door, and up in the human area were big white-plastic tubs of pointy oats with their hulls still on, and some ground-up pellets that I think had vitamins and things in them, that smelled like chalk or maybe Vitamin C tablets, although that last bit could have just been my imagination.

  The door was only latched with a wire latch with a pin that went through the door so you could open it from the other side if you had to, and when I unhooked it, the door swung open.

  “Come on,” I said. “You have to run away. As fast as you can. So they can’t catch you. They’ll kill you for biting him, they’ll think you’re crazy pigs or something.”

  At first, none of the pigs came to me, but then a few did. The other pigs looked at them nasty, but I ignored them. When the first pigs reached me, I walked with them out of the pig barn and into the yards. We walked all the way across the yards to the edge of the field.

  It was very dark and cold now, and I was shivering hard. It seemed like the moonlight had gone all weak and lost its thickness; it was bright but far, far away.

  The gate to the field was chained shut, and covered with barbed wire so the pigs wouldn’t get out and wreck up the fields. I climbed over the fence okay but forgot to check before I jumped off the other side, and my nightgown ripped one long, unforgivable rip that seemed to go on forever. One whole side had come off, up to my waist.

  I didn’t have time to mess with it, so I gave it a big jerk, which left me with a couple of loose flapping parts over my legs.

  The last link of the chain was on a nail; I lifted it off and unwrapped the chain, trying to make sure my coat sleeves didn’t get caught on anymore barbed wire. That chain got heavier and heavier the more of it I unwrapped, too. But finally it was done, and I dropped the whole heav
y thing, which fell down along the black tarred log of the fencepost with a too-loud rattle. I froze.

  One of the lights came up in the house.

  Quickly, I grabbed onto the gate and pulled. The gate was a rigid, long piece of metal all welded together, but different types of wire had been added to it, from chicken wire to square metal fencing to barbed wire. I tried to keep my fingers between the barbs, but it didn’t always work out.

  “Chuck?” someone called.

  I jerked harder, but it wasn’t moving much. It hadn’t been opened for a long time; there was mud built up all around it.

  “Help me,” I whispered. “Push!”

  That was the third miracle.

  The pigs dug their snouts into it, pushed their sides into it, and pushed, grunting from the barbs poking into them, but doing it anyway.

  As soon as the gate was wide enough, I dropped it and whispered, “Good enough! Please go, please hurry!”

  And the pigs started running out of the gate. A couple of them tried to push ahead in line, but they got bitten, and the pigs started pouring out of the pig yard and into the field, like they were marching.

  The front door opened, and my Grandma yelled, “Chuck! You out there? I think something’s got into the pigs. Chuck!”

  But that wasn’t the worst part; Grandpa’s shadow was coming up behind her, and I could see that he had something long in his arms. A shotgun, probably.

  It seemed like a lot of pigs went running through the gate, but also not enough.

  The geese woke up and started honking to beat all hell, and Grandpa shouted at them, but they didn’t stop. I hoped they were getting in his way, but I didn’t dare look.

  As soon as the last of the pigs went through, I went back inside and clomped toward the barn. I hoped that Grandpa wouldn’t shoot me. He was already walking across the grass to the barns.