Pigs by Johanna Stoberock

Author:Johanna Stoberock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The room was a mess. From the window it looked like a dormitory. The floor was covered with crumpled clothes, belts and stockings and lace underwear scattered everywhere. The grown-ups all seemed to have beds of their own, though how many beds exactly it was hard to say. Each bed was draped with a gauzy mosquito netting cloak, but the beds were lined up two by two just like in the juice-stained set of Madeline books Luisa had thrown to the pigs the week before. From the window, Luisa and Andrew couldn’t see the grown-ups clearly, but they could hear the sounds of their sleepy breathing, and they could see their fancy shoes kicked off beside their beds. Boys and girls seemed to share the same room. Or maybe it was men and women. It was hard to think of the grown-ups as grown up when they slept together like French orphans tucked in matching beds.

Andrew took one look at the room and crouched back on the ground. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Otis must be somewhere else.”

Luisa ignored him. She gripped the windowsill and pulled herself up higher, balancing on her arms.

One of the bodies in one of the beds began to stir. First it stretched out sleepy arms to push the netting to the side. Then it kicked covers off sleepy feet. The sheets were bunched up around the middle of the body, and whoever it was, golden hair fell to the body’s shoulders. Luisa waited for it to turn toward her so she could see who was waking up. Would it be the one who always wore red lipstick? If so, would she be wearing it now? Would it be the one who twirled the waxed ends of his mustache and wore a cream colored blazer that was always clean, no matter what part of the island he was trekking through? If so, interesting that he didn’t actually sleep in the blazer. Maybe it was the one who wore cologne, or the one with pointy teeth, or the one who wore the emerald ring. She screwed up her eyes, but she couldn’t make out the details. The stretching of limbs was slow and languorous and for quite some time Luisa thought whoever it was would just go back to sleep. Andrew tugged at her leg and she tried to pull her eyes away—they were there to search for Otis. But she couldn’t look away for long: all those sleeping bodies made it impossible to resist turning back. She’d never had a chance to stare at the grown-ups as squarely as she was doing now. They looked like dolls.

When the body finally turned, it wasn’t the woman with the lipstick or the man with the mustache, or any of the other grown-ups she had seen before. In fact, it wasn’t a grownup at all. It was Eddie. His eyes were shut, and his lips were slightly parted, and he made small scared sounds in his sleep and moved his hands like he was trying to pull ropes apart.

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