BLUE RIBBON

Susan was still alive when the hogs began to understand basic English. She never got to see it firsthand—the cancer metastasizing in her bones kept her chained to IV drips and electrical monitors in the city—but I told her about it during the sterile nights in the hospital that I spent by her side. 

Every night, she asked me to ramble about anything until the pain meds drew the curtains shut on her waking mind and she fell asleep. I read her scribbled poetry, like when we were first married twenty-five years ago, and relayed stories from our two children in college and high school. I told her about the farm, and I told her about Crystal—the smartest of the swine, and getting smarter all the time. If Susan thought any of this was strange, those final months of her life were too fogged by pain and painkillers for her to articulate it.

I’ve spent most of my life working in the field of mutation. For decades, I employed experimental diets and selective breeding to produce the finest livestock available in the Northern Midwest. You likely don’t know my name, but you’ve probably eaten eggs laid by my chickens and grilled steak carved out of my cows. Maybe you’ve seen my billboard off the westbound lane of I-94, near Menomonie, Wisconsin. 

“BLUE RIBBON GENETICS: THE BEST, FOR THE BEST.”

But in all of that time, I never could imagine a nightmare like the one I saw when I watched Susan’s cells viciously mutate and consume their host… or a miracle like the one I saw when Crystal and her litter began to speak.

Of all my sows, Crystal was the largest, strongest, and most definitely smartest. She was the first one I noticed whispering in her piglets’ ears, telling them to be on their best behavior when I came around.

That afternoon, I had a meeting with Susan’s doctors—the meeting where they told us that we were nearing the point of no return, that they were going to try a few more particularly aggressive treatments but, in all likelihood, my wife was going to die sooner rather than later. I drove home sick with cold, heavy grief and barely managed to drag myself into the farmhouse, before I remembered that the hogs still needed to be fed.

I hauled a sack of cornmeal to the pen and it was in that moment, while suffering pumped through my heart like an oily poison, that I first caught Crystal snap a quick “Sit!” at one of her sons. The young pig was causing a ruckus, squealing and ramming into his siblings, but when Crystal spoke he immediately came to a rest. He sat completely still during the entire time I was in the pen shoveling feed into their trough. 

Crystal didn’t blurt out anything else for the rest of the evening, but when I was finished and about to leave, we shared a glance—like when a parent’s child is misbehaving in a public space and the parent looks to another adult as if to say, “Kids, y’know? What can you do?”

As Susan’s illness worsened and her treatments intensified, I was allowed to sit at her side less and less. My evenings became steadily quieter, my drives to the city less frequent. Our son, Colin, was far away, getting his agricultural degree from an out-of-state university. Our daughter, Marissa, was busy with the constant motion of being a teenager with a new driver’s license.

It was during this time that Crystal and I began to openly converse.

I’d sit in the pen after her offspring fell asleep and we’d swap stories of our children, our loves, and our fears. Crystal’s English was rudimentary, but her mind was bright and emotive, and her speaking improved at a rapid rate. I told her about the great stories called literature that I kept in the den inside the farmhouse, and I think that’s when Crystal’s obsession began to take root. When I told her about the novels, histories, and textbooks containing a nearly infinite wealth of human knowledge and creativity in my library, she understood that all of human virtue was stored in that old farmhouse only a handful of yards from her pen.

Eventually, I started to allow Crystal to roam outside of her pen. When I was able to explain to her and the other swine that the world beyond the farm was dangerous, full of wolves and men with guns and cars that moved fast enough to smear them across asphalt like jelly on toast, it made it much easier to prevent them from fleeing the property.

At night, Crystal and I sat on the grass under the stars and I read her Dickens and Twain and Joyce by the light of an LED lamp. The lamp made her small, black eyes glow with a radiance that was beautiful and suggested her mind was alight with dreams.

Susan died that September. I skipped my annual showing at the State Fair.

Not long after Susan’s body finished mutating itself into a cold, quiet oblivion, I decided to let Crystal inside the farmhouse. The weather was getting colder and, even though it didn’t bother Crystal through her thick hog skin, I was much more comfortable continuing our nightly dialogues in the warmth of the house’s cozy den.

No one was around to bother us, either. After the funeral, Colin stopped coming home during his breaks from school and Marissa… Marissa was preoccupied with what she referred to as her “coping mechanisms.” I’d never heard of drinking, smoking pot, and hanging around with boys twice her age as viable coping mechanisms for grief, but Crystal told me that I needed to let her make her own mistakes and live with them, too.

Susan and I had never been big drinkers, even when we were young, but I suppose that was just one more small way Marissa had mutated away from her genetic predecessors, as we all do. She never liked the hogs much, anyways, and probably wouldn’t have approved of Crystal spending so much time in the house. She didn’t like the way they squealed, the way they rooted around in the dirt, the way they’d eat anything you gave them, even bones. I still wish she’d taken the time to get to know Crystal before it was too late.

Getting a taste of human living inside the farmhouse only made Crystal crave more. She began to stay in the house all the time. She slept in the empty space that Susan used to occupy in our bed. We ate our meals at the dining table and Crystal wiped her snout on towels that I laid out for her. She talked about bringing her litter into the house. The other swine still spent most of the time in their pen, but Crystal hinted that she wanted to introduce her entire clan into the new world that she had discovered.

One morning, Crystal told me that she wanted to wear clothes—human clothes. With a little amateur sewing, I managed to turn some of Susan’s old maternity clothes into a functional dress for Crystal. She said it made her feel beautiful.

Every day Crystal was smarter than the last. She nearly opened the door herself when the police came to tell me that there had been an accident on Old Wells Road involving ice and liquor and that my seventeen year old daughter was dead.

I stayed in bed for a long time after that. There was no more poetry, no more literature, no more stars. Crystal would lay in bed and whisper to me, and it was like I couldn’t even hear her. She asked if she could bring her litter into the farmhouse and I told her I didn’t care, so she did.

They weren’t like her, though. From in my bedroom, I could hear them squeal and root in my den. Crystal tried to read to them from the library, but the younger pigs were too set on destroying themselves with the grain alcohol stored in the basement and the endless supply of feed in the silo. They tore up the books and the furniture and smashed the photographs on the wall. Somehow, Crystal’s miraculous mutation was perfectly countered by her offspring’s vile mutations.

The phone rang and rang as bills piled at the farmhouse’s door. No one dared knock when they heard the incessant screeching of the hogs inside my home. No one, except my son.

“Dad?” Colin called from in front of the house.

I rolled over and burrowed deeper into my cocoon of sheets on the bed. Crystal, laying beside me, asked if I wanted her to get the door and I said no.

“Dad, I’m coming in!” Colin yelled and I slid out of bed for the first time in weeks.

I found Colin standing in the den, ankle-deep in shredded books and hog shit. The pigs circled him at a distance and threatened him with snarls. Colin looked at me with pity and disgust. I was covered in bed sores and mud that Crystal had dragged into bed.

“I came because Larry and Rachel said they haven’t seen you since Marissa’s funeral,” Colin said. “Dad, I don’t know what’s going on here, but we need to get these pigs out and get you some help.”

He shoved some of the hogs towards the back door and they howled obscenities, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“No!” I croaked.

He looked at me. “Jesus Christ, Dad, what’s going on here?”

“No,” I said, “They’re my family.”

Colin blinked. “Okay, so you really need some help.” He shoved another pig towards the backdoor.

Crystal thudded down the stairs and screeched when she saw what was happening. Colin looked away from the pigs at his feet and saw Crystal, dressed in his mother’s clothes. His look of concern deepened. “What the fuck is that?”

“What’s he DOING?!” Crystal squealed. “Stop him!”

“He’s my son, Crystal,” I said and Colin’s confusion grew.

“He’s taking my children!” Crystal screamed and charged at Colin. Her litter opened a pathway for her as she thundered across the den.

“Crystal!” I yelled.

Before Colin could react, Crystal threw her quarter-ton of mass into his body and he crumpled backwards with a grunt. His head smacked against an empty shelf of my bookcase and he slumped to the ground in a limp, broken pile. 

The last of Susan’s children was dead.

I fell to my knees and sobbed. Crystal panted next to me and the young pigs released a cacophony of exhilarated oinks.

“It’s okay,” Crystal said. “It’s okay. I love you. I love you. We’re your family.”

She nudged me away from the scene with her snout and the other pigs dragged Colin’s body out of the house. By the next morning, he was completely gone, even the bones.

Now, every night I sit in the den with Crystal and our children. I read them scribbled poetry and tell them stories of blue ribbons won in another life. 

Something has mutated inside of me, too, I think. Maybe it did a long time ago.