Parsec Issue 1 by edited by Ian Whates

Author:edited by Ian Whates [Whates, edited by Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Redfern Jon Barrett is author to novels including Proud Pink Sky, upcoming 2022 from Amble Press, while their shorter fiction has been published in Booth, The Sun Magazine, FFO, and Passages North. Redfern holds a Ph.D. in Literature, is nonbinary, and currently lives in Berlin with their two partners. Read more at redjon.com.

THE POWER OF 3

ANNA TAMBOUR

1

The First Little Pig

“OH, NO,” said the pig.

“Oh, yes,” said the wolf. “Sorry.”

Look,” said the wolf. “It’d be so much easier if you’d just accept. Once every telling, I burn your house down.”

He pulled out a monogrammed silver lighter.

“No,” said the pig.

“Don’t get stroppy with me,” said the wolf, flashing a gold-capped canine.

“Then don’t get sloppy with me,” said the pig. “And close that mouth. What do you do to my home, my castle, the place I keep my slippers?”

“What d’you mean?” said the wolf, who had started to breathe heavily.

“Take it easy,” said the pig. “You must be, what, pension age now?”

“And your chins wag. You keen to be burnt up too? Please move aside.”

The pig’s tidy ankles moved not one jot. “Do I have to repeat myself,” he said. “Think back. My house is made of straw, so you—”

“Burn it to a crisp!”

“Do you want to go down in history as an ijit? Must I repeat, what d’you do to my house? Eat it?”

“You think I’m an ijit!?”

“Banish it?”

“Don’t be daft.”

“Just try to concentrate. Yes. Close your eyes and say after me. I huff and I puff, and I—come on. I bl—”

“I blows your house down,” muttered the wolf.

“Blow is quite sufficient,” said the pig. “But why the shifty eye? So you can’t remember. So you get mixed up. So you’re short of breath. So perhaps you purposely forgot. I’m no rooster. I won’t crow.”

“We don’t talk,” said the wolf.

“So that you remember.”

But the wolf had never had a nose for irony. “It’s time.”

“Rightee-oh,” said the pig. “But first, would you excuse me for a tick?”

“Just a tick. Remember, this story isn’t just about you. I’ve a house to burn.”

“Oh, I remember. Now I’ll be just a mo’.”

The pig didn’t try to shut the door, so as the wolf watched the pig’s neat footsteps as he trotted down the spotless hall, not a straw out of place; he looked down also at his own feet, at the swept step, and then around at the front garden—everything in perfect order.

A shit builder, thought the wolf. But, he whistled wistfully, such a tidy neighbour I can only wish I had.

“Here ’tis,” said the pig, appearing again in a buttoned-up dustcoat and carrying a new straw broom.

“You want a little dustup,” said the wolf magnanimously. “It’s not in the story, and everything’s in its place here but—”

“Not quite,” said the pig, who then beat the wolf to such a death that the step was covered in hairy mush, except for two things that the pig fished out, wearing rubber gloves to do so.

The pig scooped the mush up into a big red basin and carried

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