Princess

Marcy and her thirty-two-year-old son, Ricky, were sitting on the couch watching the evening television. In front of them was a small table with food, both on the plates and scattered around. The program was a soap opera that they rewatched numerous times. Cigarette smoke dimmed the already weak lighting. The peeling wallpaper was adopting the smell and color of years of incessant smoke and stale tired air.

“Miguel never deserved her! Disgusting cheating bastard!” Marcy shouted at the screen between taking a bite from a chicken leg and heaving the last drag from the cigarette in her other hand. She stubbed it out in a tray that was brimming with butts. The flaccid fat deposit on her upper arm swung left and right, following the motions of extinguishing the cigarette.

“Mama, do I deserve a girl like Maria?” Ricky’s eyes jiggled from the carpet to her face.

“Ricky, you are even more stupid than your father was. How can a Pisces deserve a Sagittarius?” Shocked at his question, Marcy scolded him. “How many times have I told you which signs don’t belong together? I accepted Bradley, even though he was a Libra, and look at what happened?”

“He died.”

“Worse, he made me birth you.” Marcy gave him an icy look. “Now I’m stuck with a simple fat boy who barely earns any money, and he just died. That card reader, Stella, must have read it wrong. I would have never accepted him if I had known it would make me end up on this pig farm with you. She told me that the man I was seeing at the time would bring me happiness, and he was the one. A good-for-nothing pig farmer.”

Ricky had heard all of this many times before. He knew that she would dive into a rant if he asked her if he was worthy of anything. While she spewed her thoughts on him and his father, he fixated on the burned spots on the carpet around her. The cigarette embers only burned it slightly, since it was damp and heavy. His fixation on the holes, dramatic voices from the television, and his mother talking somehow comforted him. Predictable, common and known, yet it felt like picking a crust from a wound, and letting it erupt like it hadn’t even started the process of healing. It was comforting, unlike his work, which he didn’t like much. The craft of pig slaughter was the only thing his father had taught him to do fifteen years ago, and it had kept him and Marcy fed since his death.

He was always afraid of pigs. Their eyes and skin looked almost human to him, as if they wanted to say something. It always felt like, if they ever did say something to Ricky, it would be something mean and hurtful. Since he was a boy, he saw them as malformed humans, bent on all fours without hands and feet, forced to rummage through mud, eating scraps and food remains as if cursed. It certainly made it easier to kill them, but he didn’t enjoy the process. The sows he liked a bit more, as they were peaceful and fed the piglets. He liked to name them, since they were in the sty for much longer than the rest of the pigs.

“Don’t be angry at me mama. Do you want me to go learn a trade that would make more money?” Ricky suggested, “I heard metalworkers earn good.”

“Learn a new trade? Hah! You barely learned how to butcher. Besides, after thirty you’d be too old to learn anything new, even if you weren’t so stupid.”

“I have to slaughter Princess tomorrow. That Mr. Clark called yesterday and asked me for a lot of meat. He is making a feast, and said that he will pay good if I can do it fast.”

“What did I tell you about naming the pigs? Don’t do that, it’s bad luck.” Marcy scolded him again.

“All right, mama, I won’t.”

Marcy stopped eating and looked at Ricky.

“I heard of Mr. Clark, he is the one with that new car?”

“I don’t know about the car, but he said he needed pork for the feast soon, and that he can pay well if I can get him that,” Ricky said.

“Well, you don’t want him waiting, then, do you? Go to bed so you can start early.”

“All right, mama, goodnight.” He stood up and left Marcy to her food and television.

Ricky never slept well. As a child, it was because of his parent’s constant fighting. He would curl under the sheets and listen to them shouting at each other in the other room until his mind diluted into dreams. Now it was more due to how damp the house was, which didn’t work well with his general health conditions. It rained often where they lived, and he loved rain. It felt as if it was a mask around him, shielding him from the outside world.

Since Princess was quite big and somewhat special to him, Ricky decided to skip the part where he knocked her out with a mallet. Better just to shoot her in the head with a revolver. He’d made that decision only a few times, when the pigs that were next in line for slaughter became dear to him. He wanted them to go out instantly, while enjoying their last meal, never suspecting what would happen. However, he didn’t have any more bullets, so he had to go to town to get some at the gun shop, and he dreaded going to town. The people in it gave him looks that he couldn’t really understand, but he was willing to endure them this time. Princess deserved it.

He drove his barely working van all the way to the gun shop. Upon entering he froze. The store employee was a woman.

“Hello! How can I help you?”

Ricky stood there, looking at her.

“Hello?” she said, again. Ricky approached the counter.

“Bullets.” He drew the revolver and laid it in front of her. She took a step back, forcing herself to not cover her nose to shield it from the cloud of stench Ricky carried with him.

“Umm… Okay, that’s a.38, we should have those, let me check.” She went through a cupboard to her side. “Here you go. The case costs forty.”

Ricky took out some cash and put it on the counter.

“What is your sign?” he asked.

“Excuse me? What sign?”

“I’m a Pisces. Mama says a Sagittarius can’t like me.”

“Oh, um… I don’t feel comfortable talking about that. Do you need anything else from the store?”

Ricky gave her another long look, took the bullets, and left the store. On his way back, he drove fast. He wasn’t sure why, but he had an urge to slam the pedal all the way.

After parking in the driveway, Ricky stomped through mud and puddles to the backyard, which had a pig sty, a freezer container, and a scalding tank. The odor would have been unbearable for close neighbors, but the farm they lived on was a good drive from the town center. The families that used to live around them had died of old age or moved to town, so Ricky and Marcy lived alone in the rancid miasma of pig stench.

The sty hosted around two dozen pigs, all farrowed by Princess. The piglets became giddy when Ricky entered, but the sow was sleeping on her side in the corner. The foul reek bothered even Ricky because he didn’t get around to cleaning the pig toilet often, which was the corner in which Princess was resting. Pigs usually avoid sleeping in their feces. They’d only do so if the mud they use to cool themselves wasn’t available or clean. Ricky was slightly nervous about that. He knew that he would have cleaned Princess’s corner if he wasn’t so busy with the constant slaughter. He would have loved some help.

Ricky took a thin stick and smacked Princess. She stood up and went outside, grunting all the way with each smack. He threw a bucket of slop on the ground in front of the sty. Princess gobbled and ruffled around the mud, while Ricky drew the revolver from under his apron, filled the chambers, and pointed it at her.

Then Ricky was looking at the hole in the pig’s forehead. The blood dribbled out of it, down her snout into the mud. He stood like that for a while. The view reminded him of the day his father died, because he’d also been slaughtering a sow in the mud.

Using a combination of ropes and hooks, he pulled the dead swine up the rack. Ricky circled the carcass, steadying its swing with one hand. He took a knife from his apron and sharpened it before cutting the artery on the sow’s neck. The red laminar flow gradually filled the container below the rack. It was during the exsanguination that his father had had a fatal stroke. Ricky’d found him face down in the pool of blood just like this one.

“Good morning, Ricky!” A gentleman’s voice greeted him, “We were taking our new wheels for a spin, so I dropped by to check if the meat will be ready on time. I hope you don’t mind my intrusion.”

Ricky turned around and saw an older, well-dressed man with a young woman beside him.

“Oh god, that’s disgusting!” The woman covered her mouth when she saw the blood flow.

“This is Charlotte, it’s her graduation party we are throwing a feast for.” Mr. Clark introduced his daughter. “Come on, cupcake; how else did you imagine this looked like?”

“Why would I ever want to imagine it?” Charlotte was visibly repulsed.

Ricky didn’t know how to react, “This is the sow I told you about over the telephone, Mr. Clark.” Turning to Charlotte, Ricky felt a wave of exhilaration because he realized he had something to tell her that she might like.

“Her name is Princess!” Ricky grinned at Charlotte while pointing at the bleeding carcass. Charlotte turned her face from it.

“I’m waiting in the car. I can’t watch this.” She turned around and marched back across the yard.