Pearl by Josh Malerman

Author:Josh Malerman [Malerman, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

25

…the pigs strung up for the slaughter.

Only a piglet then, just born. Pearl’s mother was one of the many hanging from the hooks.

He didn’t know Death then, not yet, but was about to learn. He hadn’t been alive long enough to hear his mother cry, and even if they shared a pen for the next ten years he might have been spared the sounds. His mother wasn’t asking for help. Even fresh from the womb he understood this much. Just born, his intuition was astonishing. The dark filaments in his mother’s eyes were bad, Pearl knew, because he felt it first. And when the farmer entered the barn, knife in hand, Pearl knew this, too, was bad. His siblings, boy and girl piglets in the same cardboard box, played with one another, impervious to the horrors hanging not ten feet away. But Pearl placed his delicate hooves upon the wall of the box. He watched.

He saw the fear in his mother and the fear in the others, strung up, too.

As if the emotions were curling out the nostrils of their snouts, their natures begging for escape. Pearl smelled it. Something burning; safety, happiness, calm. As if the adult pigs themselves were burning, their bodies eaten by a feeling.

The farmer must have noticed all this, too. In a vague, inexperienced way, Pearl knew this to be true. And yet…

The man cut once, twice, three times the throats of the hanging pigs, delivering bright splashes, red estuaries that traveled to the tips of their ears. Pearl knew that it was pretty. The prettiest thing Pearl had ever seen. The way the colorful blood played upon the lips of the pigs, their snouts, into their eyes, then pooling on the dirty blue tarp protecting the barn floor.

Pearl watched them, ignorant of Death yet. But when he noted their silence, he understood something final had happened.

He crawled out of the box to find out exactly what it was.

The farmer, a hulking creature half in shadows, noticed. He looked different than mother. Different than the other piglets. His dismissive, uncaring energy was frightening to Pearl; it was clear, too; he didn’t care for the piglets in the box, didn’t care for them the same way he cared for himself. Pearl was able to see this as easily as seeing if the barn was bright or dark. The man was dark. Toward the pigs he was black. Indifferent. Colorless. A feelingless shape in the barn, wielding an unfathomable tool, a scythe, a blade that shined whether or not light was upon it. He smelled dark, too. Smelled of loneliness and anger and impatience. Pearl couldn’t know that beneath the man’s flannel shirt were scars from gear, small accidents in the fields, bad cuts that had only half healed, or that the farmer’s nearest neighbor had recently told him he should sell this place, sell everything, because he was going under, sinking, and that a sinking farm couldn’t tread water.

Pearl trotted to the farmer’s feet, and the farmer noticed.

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