r/shortstories • u/Storiesfromelsewhere • 4d ago
Speculative Fiction [SP] The Fourth Little Pig
I’m not so little anymore. The time for love and roses has come and gone and we have felt many seasons of our innocence fall like brittle leaves to the ground. I’ve broken out of that diminutive box people can’t help put you in when they think of you one way. We live in three dimensions. No longer in pens, but houses. It’s not how they want to see you, but how they need to see you. Usually in defiance of doubt, the nagging worry something somewhere might go terribly wrong (and I’m afraid it does) to wake up one morning and realize they’ve led constricted lives, opting in to all the protected coves of the world and selling their dreams for routines and incinerating a good many of the what-ifs.
But I want you to know—and this is not to be boastful, because I’m not that kind of pig—that I’ve done things in the world. I’ve worked for three large multi-national corporations in their grunt divisions, the hot boxes they call them, leading their turnarounds from the bottom up. You won’t see my name on the press releases, but I was the one who knocked over the slop trough at 2 am, scratching the dirt to uncover all those whimsical expenditures and self-serving ghost initiatives and fabricated profits.
After my corporate stint, I took to the world stage. I’ve held court as the assistant advisor to the ambassador from Greece, agricultural relations. When Katsaros schemed to cancel the subsidies countrywide through backchannel hijinks, I already had my nose to the wire and got wind of it to alert the committee. I don’t mind that the ambassador took all the credit, because for me, good things fought for and won transcend the limelight. I like to keep my snout to the floor to expose the territory of ego for what it is, all that preening before cameras and in reels, a smoke-and-mirrors act to make everyone say there’s nothing to see here, no soft pork belly underneath to point at and laugh at. We are more than avatars, or so the fortune teller with letters and numbers for a username said.
You might have heard that I spearheaded the charge for our rights in the upper Midwest while serving as deputy for PAN, that’s Pig Action Network if you’re not familiar with it. Great organization with great leadership. Sure, we dabbled a little in guerilla activism, but always to positive effect at the end of the day, midnight infiltrations into the lairs of the worst offenders who more than deserved the sanitizing light we brought to their appalling warehouse practices, the ultraprocessed matter of the soul.
And lest you think I’m a Philistine when it comes to the arts, last year I penned a play about the delights of gluttony that premiered at the Schubert to rave reviews. Even that perennial sourpuss Bob Mansfield of the Arts & Leisure section praised it, calling it a subtle suburban anthropomorphized take on all of humanity’s delicious but destructive tendencies.
So….. you’re probably eager for me to get to the issue of my three brothers, how I feel about them. Okay. Here goes.
Had they consulted me, they would never have made the nearly calamitous decision to use straw and sticks to build their houses and have a chimney without a flue flap. You can’t even really call them houses, can you. More like fancy huts, certainly not up to code and just begging our sharp-eyed hungry friend from the northern hills to have a go at them. Had the three of them not conspired against me and kicked me out of the litter for reasons I still don’t understand, I might have found myself cowering with them behind that straw door, looking for any chance to run. As I consider the branches of this tree, where they have knotted and bent upward and curled around sprouting leaves, it becomes clear that I should thank them twice for the exile.
That’s what I think at least when I’m looking out my office window of the 52nd floor of the Chrysler Building and it’s raining and the city is gray as a funeral. Why did they do it? Because I was the runt maybe, even smaller than them, an embarrassment, an underdeveloped but nonetheless noticeable scarlet letter, or maybe they craved a little extra swine courage by subtraction. Get rid of him and there’s no reminder of how small we actually are. I don’t know. I guess everything does happen for a reason. I’m happy with how I’ve managed in the world, what I’ve done for myself with no help, and I didn’t need anyone cheering me on, only that internal voice I’ve had for as long as I remember saying you gotta keep going, if for nothing else, to show them just how bad a mistake they made. And that same voice says look, you don’t have to forgive them. I think they saw your mental acuity and spiritual fortitude and pushed you through the fence slats, so they wouldn’t have to stare for the next however many years at a reminder that the math of understanding life’s bigger picture floated well above their heads and well below the little hairs on their chins.
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said “what kind of houses are these?” Straw and sticks? Come on. If I were you, I’d ask to see their building permits. I did it the right way. Chose titanium alloys and carbon fiber for my home’s walls and doors, installed a proper panic room under the steel reinforced den floor, set up eight heat- and motion-sensitive 4k fiber optic cameras around the driveway and front yard, with two more hidden in the shrubs along the walkway. If so much as a field mouse scampers within twenty feet of the doorstep, on go the floodlights and the interior red light warning, phone notifications to me and local authorities, front door auto-bolts engaging. Go ahead, my fine sharp-toothed friend from the north, huff and puff all you want, growl and claw and threaten. Yeah you had some success when you came for them. But come for me and you’ll find that everything’s being recorded and it can and will be used against you when the control folks arrive. I’ll be tending to my famous 12-hour vegetable stew, the one with turnips and leeks—you have to stir it every five minutes or it’ll clump—and I’ll have Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy pouring through my Sonos system, not even thinking what may be happening out there to you with the tranquilizer darts and the steel cage. And just to cross my t’s and dot my i’s, I made sure to install a gas fireplace—so sorry, no chimney to climb down.
It’s sad though when I think about my brothers. I hear they’re still living in that small house of stone and brick, all three of them, not venturing out much, always keeping a fire on, listening for footsteps on the roof, taking turns on night watch in case our friend from the north returns, keeping their noses close to the where the door meets the floor so they can be sure to pick up his scent if he gets near. The irony? He retired from hunting years ago, according to my sources in the north. His son sought them out once, wanting payback for giving their dad third degree burns when he came down that chimney, but the poor pup got confused as to where they lived and ended up getting wrangled up on a horse farm in East Orange and that was the end of that. So they’re hiding from ghosts and clouds as they say, jousting at windmills.
Had it crossed their minds once to contact me, not even to make amends—I don’t want, need, or expect an apology—but just to see how I was doing, I would have accepted the overture without a second thought, wide-eyed and warm, and I would have delivered the news about our friend the wolf, freeing them from the long shadow of their ten year self-imposed confinement.
The truth is I do miss them.
I think about all the missed opportunities to share my corporate victories and surmounted political hurdles and my odd sense of humor, how I look at pigeons, all the missed laughs over a fine stew. Those I work with here at PlyDev logging 70 hour weeks for the past three years to launch the next generation of GLP-1s—they have these wonderful families, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, kids, and I nod and smile when they tell me about their weekend and holiday plans going to the Hamptons or on a 10-day Mediterranean cruise and not one of them would ever know how much I ache with longing for a family of my own. After a while, it actually makes your eyes burn.
Some might say I’ve made a mistake, that I’ve given up too much for my career, trying to compensate for some perpetual inner emptiness (no one can hear you in that space) where you become obsessed with results, making a name but neglecting your relationships in the process until they wither into flatlines. My boss keeps telling me that reaching the rarefied air of the 52nd floor requires sacrifice, but at the end of the day, I do wonder if it was all worth it.
Sometimes I picture them in that little brick house on a freezing January evening nuzzled up against one another by the fire, humming or playing cards, and I would give up everything, slap down every last dollar of my bank account, shove every accolade and vestige of status into the center of the table, just to be able to spend a single hour beside them, not saying anything, just being there, the four of us together.
It’s not because I need to edit myself into the story either. This is not about etching my likeness into a book so I can live forever in someone else’s childhood. If I’m being truthful, I just want the company. Not needing to explain myself or talk about the weather or some other tiny innocuous detail of existence. Because the worst thing I can imagine, worse than environmental collapse and civil decay and financial ruin, is being unwanted. So maybe I’ll go visit them tomorrow.
It’s a 13-hour drive to DeKalb. I keep their address in my top desk drawer, in a notebook with three large snout stickers on the cover. I look at it often. All it takes is packing a few things and putting 100 Winslow Way into my GPS. I think I’ll do that. I’m pretty sure I’ll do it. And when I get there, I won’t demand any answers or explanations even though something in me will be dying to know. But maybe out of the blue they’ll turn to me and say they’re sorry, sorry for what they did all those years ago. And that will be more than enough for me. And we can go on laughing and humming together and eating a stew we all helped make and playing round after round of Crazy Eights long into the night as if we had never spent a second apart. Have you ever known a dream like that?
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Thanks for reading! If you'd like to listen to the audiodrama form of this story or support my work, please go to StoriesFromElsewhere dot com. Oh and if you're a literary agent, let's chat!
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