Free Cherished by Barbara Abercrombie Page A

fearless. To run with wild abandon when the urge struck. To be grateful for mice tails and blue-belly lizards. To sit quietly in a window filled with sunlight. To be generous with leftover cereal milk. To stand naked and unflinching while being watched.
    Perhaps it is the steadiness of an animal’s presence that gives us comfort. Calico, a black, white, and tan cat, provided that steadiness for me. People could be unreliable. People could leave. But Calico stayed for eighteen years. I have to believe she had a purpose here, and it wasn’t to report back to another planet on the naked human body. She was the mother who stayed. And although I hid my grief when she left, she surfaces so often now when I write. She is within arm’s reach across the table. I can feel the stretch of her spine against the palm of my hand. She keeps showing up to tell me more. It is her indelible spirit that begs me to keep her alive for as long as I can here on the page.

8.
RED THE PIG

May-lee Chai
    G rowing up on a farm, I wasn’t a fool. I knew our animals were destined to become food. But the year I raised my pig, I hadn’t expected to be the instrument of his death. Red wasn’t even supposed to be mine to begin with.
    â€œPigs are ‘farm savers,’ ” my brother insisted one night at dinner. “Everyone knows that.”
    â€œWe don’t need any more animals,” I said, thinking of our seven hundred laying hens, two Holsteins, and three goats. I was seventeen and in my last year of high school, and I wanted no part in raising pigs.
    â€œPlease, Mom. Please,” my brother begged. “We’ll just raise bottle pigs. You feed ’em until they’re big enough to survive on their own, then you sell ’em. Jimmy knows all about it.” (Not his real name.)
    â€œJimmy’s not going to be doing the work,” I argued.
    â€œSure he will! He promised. He’s gonna help me. Please, Mom. Can we get a sow?”
    My mother’s brow wrinkled. Ever since we had moved to this town from the East Coast, we’d had trouble fitting in. My father was Chinese, my mother white. People in our town weren’t used to seeing this kind of mixed-race family, and they’d told my brother and me to our faces that we were the Devil’s Spawn. God didn’t want the races to mix, that’s why he put them on different continents.
    My mother had tried hard to find a way for my younger brother to fit in, be accepted in a community where masculinity was defined by how many acres your family owned and farmed, by how many head of cattle you raised, and — unspoken by any of us but secretly acknowledged — by the color of your hair and eyes. Straw hair, blue eyes, trumped my brother every time.
    Our father was working as a consultant, having left the teaching job that had brought us to this small community in South Dakota. He traveled constantly. That was a factor too. Boys in this town grew up knowing exactly where their fathers were, in the fields, in the barns, or in the local bar.
    Hence our growing menagerie. Each addition was an attempt by my mother to find the right combination of animals that would help my brother to belong. And if the animals kept me busy too, my parents figured, then all the better.
    â€œI’ll ask around,” she said finally.
    My brother turned to give me a triumphant smile.
    And so in August, our newly acquired sow went into labor.
    My brother and his friend were pulling the piglets from the grunting sow’s uterus. My brother cleared the gunk off their faces and placed them near their mother’s teats. When the placenta was finally expelled, he gave it to the sow to eat.
    The sow had given birth to eleven piglets. More than expected.
    â€œThese’ll bring in good money,” my brother crowed.
    I watched the helpless, tiny piglets grunting at their mother’s belly. They were cold despite the August heat and nestled closer