Free Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis Page A

France. Tells Little Boy they’ve got enough money left for the passports, for their journey, for one meal a day.
    Nothing more.
    â€œWhen we get there,” says Fat Man, “we’ll need jobs.”
    Little Boy closes the cash case, snapping its ruined hinges into place. “You’ll need a job,” he says. “Little boys don’t work.”
    They visit the squealing pigs.
    They sleep in the mud.

THE PIG KNOTS
    Little Boy wakes. He sees the farmer’s daughter is stalking toward him and his snoring brother. He raises his hand in an awkward, fearful greeting. She grabs him by the scalp; she breathes words he cannot understand, words he can’t answer. He can’t see her eyes in the darkness. Only the long, sallow shadows cast by her brow, which creep into the gaunt valleys of her cheekbones. He can’t see her teeth or her lips—only the divot underneath her nose like a teardrop, and the hole of her mouth.
    He thinks she is asking him questions, that she’s blaming him for something he’s sure he didn’t do, would never do. She holds him by the hair on the back of his head, pulling it harshly. She takes his hand in her hand. Her hateful grasp.
    â€œHow can this be?” she says, in Japanese. “I am a virgin.”
    She pushes his hand against her stomach as if she means to pull him inside. Their sticky skin is touching, her belly, his fingers. He didn’t think she was naked. Perhaps her robe is open. She says, “What have you done to me? What has America done?”
    Then the drums begin. Wild-thrashing in her gut. She holds his hand in place until the thing inside her makes him sore. He digs with hard, dirty nails into the cold, taut swell of her belly. He means to draw blood but the heat doesn’t come. It doesn’t come.
    Morning now. Little Boy finds Fat Man standing with the mother at the edge of the pigpen, leaning over the fence, her hands on a post. The wind tugs at her hair. She leans over the fence and watches. The father and his daughter kneel in pig shit, it is smeared all over their bodies. The sows birth lumpy little piglets into father’s and daughter’s waiting hands. They rinse the piglets with well water from a bucket, straining blood and mucus through their fingers. They tuck the newborns in the blankets. They roll them up together; they pile baby pigs for warmth.
    The piglets seem only half-formed, pale and fetal.
    The father instructs his daughter as they work. He lifts sow tails and points to the swollen, painful things beneath. He whispers to her how to care for new mothers, how to pull free their young. The mother pigs look bloated in some places and in other places thin. Their bellies are distended, their ribs protrude. Their skin is shiny and wet, overstretched—nearly transparent. They lie on their sides in their filth and their blood, panting for air, squealing pitiably. Little Boy thinks what it would be like to toss them in the river. To make them drown. There is something loathsome about them. Something he can’t name. For the first time, the father acknowledges Fat Man and Little Boy. He says a word of greeting, lowering his eyes demurely as if it were his body sprouting new things. Little Boy says nothing. Fat Man imitates his word.
    Little Boy leans in for a closer look at the piglets. They are very still and very quiet.
    The father sees his interest. He takes a piglet from the rest and rolls it side to side in his hands as if molding dough. Fat Man understands that this is meant to keep the small thing warm. When the father hands it to him he rolls it in his hands too. His hands shake from repulsion; he struggles not to drop this dumb, half-made thing. The father hands another piglet to Little Boy.
    These newborns are bald all over. Their faces sag with exhausted agony; their eyes have not opened; their ears are so thin that you can see the veins inside them. They are weak children—this one can