The Pig Queen

Abstract

The Pig Queen Sheldon Costa (bio) A young girl comes upon a wild boar in the woods, and because this isn’t the story you think it is, the boar is terrified. Though he is the biggest boar in the forest, each one of his great bleached tusks the size of the girl’s torso, he has heard the rumors. For weeks, this bramble-haired child has terrorized the woodland creatures, sinking her sharp little canines into anything she can find, leaving in her wake a long and festering trail of stolen life. There are rules in this forest, and the girl has broken the most sacred: eat only what you need. The boar tries to run, but the girl is too fast. Before he can even turn around, she is already upon him, her thin fingers sunk deep into his fur, her mouth clamped tight around his throat. The boar squeals, and then goes silent. For some time, the girl feasts, her face hot from the blood, but the taste is the same as all the others: ash. She spits a hunk of thigh meat from her lips and howls, her hunger a bright red ember burning inside her. Using a stone, she slices the boar’s belly open and spills his steaming innards onto the dirt. She grips the marbled fat and yanks back the ribs, so that she can fit inside. It takes some getting used to, but before long she is trotting expertly down the road on all fours, snorting and sniffing the air. The pigskin fits perfectly, and though it is warm and sticky within, the girl enjoys this view of the world, her stomach safely turned towards the forest floor. She catches the scent of other boars and follows it until she finds the City of Pigs, a clearing in the forest where the squealing creatures have made their home. As she walks through the streets, the boars poke their heads out the windows of their mud huts or look up from the piles of acorns they’re in the process of crushing. You’re no boar, they say. No, the girl replies, shaking her tusks in agreement. I’m the Pig Queen, and all of you belong to me. The boars snort amongst themselves. They know there is a girl beneath all that fur—they recognize the smell—and they are wise enough to fear her. She has, after all, killed the biggest among them. What choice do they have? Long live the queen, they squeal, stomping their hooves. Show us how to live. All in due time, the Pig Queen says. First, I need to eat. [End Page 33] ________ In the City of Glass, there lives a boy with beautiful eyes. One day, a man tears them out of the boy’s head. In another story, he might be a prince, or a dashing rogue, but the boy in this story is unquestionably ugly, an orphan who owns nothing but the air he breathes. He isn’t even clever: on the rare occasion that he finds himself in possession of anything valuable, one of the other boys in the orphanage will trick him—I’ll tell you a secret, they’ll say, if you give me that dollar—and he always hands it over, no matter how many times they spit in his hair and call him a fool. He is perpetually astounded by the ill-will of others, rushing back to be swindled again like one of the flocks of birds who crash, each day, into the windows of the city’s tallest towers, forgetting all the previous beaks crushed by the sky’s blue illusion. When the boy was born, he had no eyes. It didn’t bother him much, but the man who owned the orphanage expected every boy to work, to wash the windows and scrub the floors, and he refused to believe a boy without eyes could accomplish such tasks, no matter how much the boy proved otherwise. So the man hired an old woman who lived down the street to build him a pair. The old woman, who was once the greatest glass blower in...