Even the Bones

Pa loved the pigs more than me.

I was often very hungry. Some nights, the house would fill with the smell of meat cooking. I would salivate, unable to concentrate on anything else. However, it was never his pigs that he was cooking.

He loved grilling beef. He would feed the burnt meat to me. The rest was eaten by him and the pigs.

I hated them. I hated how excited they were to eat the flesh of another animal. Pa told me they would eat any meat, even humans. His voice grew low and threatening as he explained in great detail how pigs eat even the bones, leaving no evidence behind.

That kept me obedient.

Pa said that it was important for them to have plenty of hay in their diet, so that they wouldn’t expect meat daily.

Yesterday I had to walk through the woods and the neighboring fields in order to steal hay from a family that lived a few farms away. Their fields were quite big, maybe too big for them to manage. I stumbled upon the rotting corpse of a cow. I didn’t know if it was old, or sick, or maybe too hungry like me.

As I walked onto the hay field, the wind picked up. The sky was an unnatural shade of yellow, maybe green.

I heard a sound growing louder. A tractor. A farmer jumped off and scrambled to cover his bales of hay. I ran up to him.

“Are you lost, little missy? A storm is brewing! You’d better come home with me. Ma will cook us up a nice meal.”

“Do you have bacon?” I asked, hopping onto the tractor. “I would love some of that.”