Free Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis Page B

barely move its hoof, can barely move its head. Its piggy nostrils flare and shrink. This animal is too thin to live. The joints are blueish, and its mouth hangs slack as if unhinged.
    Fat Man leans in close. The flesh is so doughy, so pliable—it molds itself to his fingers as he rolls it in his hands.
    Little Boy’s piglet opens its eyes and it tilts its head to look back into Little Boy’s eyes. There is perhaps a spark of recognition, some brief lucidity, and the child begins to keen. To sing for his attention, like a whisper, like a plea. Little Boy realizes he is dropping the piglet.
    Little Boy has dropped the piglet.
    â€œCareful,” shouts Fat Man.
    It’s on the ground, crumpled, barking for help. The father clucks to scold Little Boy; he shakes his head. He is whispering something about the right way to care for a piglet, and the wrong way. The dropped piglet stands up faltering, it sways on its knees and soft cloven hooves, it looks up at Little Boy.
    Fat Man says, “He looks like you. He wants to be carried.”
    It barks again. The father and the daughter are busy with the sows, there are still more babies coming out of their hindquarters, some of them have died from giving so much birth.
    The other piled piglets come to in their blankets. They wriggle out of their folds and traipse across the pigpen, halting, dipping their noses in muck and muck and muck, dragging their soft white bellies, leaving shallow furrows in the muck and muck. They sneak under the fence. They are a swarm. They are crying for something, for hunger, for love, for anything . They crowd the brothers. They gnaw toothlessly at their shoes and pant legs, tugging with slow, zombie strength, weak and implacable, urgent and breakable. The piglet swarm begs their attention. They put their fore-hooves up on their shoes. They soil themselves in anticipation, though they have not eaten; it comes out a gray milk that leaks from underneath their tails. Fat Man holds his hands up against himself like a tyrannosaur. He wants to kick them away. Little Boy leaps up on the fence. The father sets a newborn down and it too begins to cross the pen, to slip beneath the crossboards of the fence, to join the throng around Fat Man’s ankles. It is a kind of worship. They look up and beg with their eyes for him to lift them, for him to hold them in his arms. They call for Little Boy to come down.
    The mother and the daughter watch with the same pinched, illegible expression. From Little Boy’s new height, the bulge of their stomachs is apparent. Little Boy remembers and it fills him with terror. He knows what it is to be born. How it hurts, then and after.
    Fat Man calls to the farmer, the mother, their daughter, “Help me. Can you take them away?”
    No one knows what he’s saying. The piglets crowd and oink for his love. They call for Little Boy, who now balances atop the highest crossboard on the fence, feet and shaking hands, precarious. No one comes to help them or seems to understand their fear. The pigs exhaust themselves. Some go to sleep or collapse, squealing. Some of them may die. When the herd has thinned, Fat Man and Little Boy run for the house, pursued by several of the more robust piggies.
    They stay for midday meal. The births have made them guests—the mother refuses their money. The farmer brings in a butchered sow from outside. Peeking through the doorway, Little Boy assures the still panicked and nearly tearful Fat Man that the piglets are all asleep or suckling with their mothers or those mothers still living.
    Fat Man collapses against the wall. He heaves. He says, “The way they look at us.”
    â€œI saw it,” says Little Boy.
    â€œThey know,” says Fat Man.
    â€œWhat can pigs know?”
    â€œThey see us. What we are.”
    â€œYou can’t be sure of that,” says Little Boy. But he saw it too.
    The mother cooks the pork. It smells the way a burning person