I’d like to live clean, I’d like to stride through life in a crisp, clean, white shirt, and I’d like to be precise and tart in all my endeavors. But I have pigs to manage. They live in a rudimentary pen up against my house, where thin wood rails encompass a small tilted board hut, a trough, a few buckets, wide flat planes of baked sunburned clay and several precious shaded areas of mud where some of the pigs lay now in the cool muck mixture of mud, pig piss and pig shit.
I’m there now.
One of the newer pigs, so skinny, so pink! trots to me eagerly. Ah, it’s one of my favorites; I call him Dick’s Sporting Goods Rewards Card. He’s up against the rail, squinting up at me clear-eyed and trying to nudge my leg through the worn wooden rails. I’ve already had some fun with this little fella’. Remember the balance ball, and the neat backpack? Remember looking at the bikes? Sure you do. I reach over to scratch the stiff bristle behind his pink sour ear. Impulsively, he smears his muck-blasted snout against my white shirt cuff and gives a small contented grunt. See what I mean? That might be new sneakers right there–maybe even a new bike.
I survey the yard. There’s Chase Slate Visa, grazing half-heartedly at a trough, and there’s Home Depot, and there’s CitiBank, and on and on. All in various postures of need or excess.
Near the hut, half in the shade and half in the sun, Best Buy and Rotman’s Furniture Card are laying down, heaved up against each other back-to-back for support. Big old veterans of the yard. I haven’t tended to them in a while. They are sleeping, their eyes not quite closed, and they are grunting sporadically and breathing rhythmically. Each long breath out whistles softly and sounds like “feeeed meeee”. They all do that when they sleep.
Finally, reluctantly, I look up and across the whole yard to the hot wide sunny stretch, and I see Capital One Venture Card. God, he looks worse than ever. He is the biggest one, enormous, sickly, bloated brown and pink; he’s lying on his side, budged up against an overturned dented filthy bucket. He appears to be strangling at the thick folds of skin at his neck. Elsewhere, his dirty sunburned skin is stretched taut and his stick-feet point at various corners of the sky. I suddenly realize that he cannot get up anymore, and I am repulsed by him. Clouds of flies buzz at his anus and slobbered mouth and his rheumy squinted eyes, and he barely has the strength to blink.
I walk a little closer. He sounds different today–he’s in pain. Now I see it, a recent long split in his skin: another late fee. The split is slowly spilling pus ooze and watery pink blood that climbs down his heaving belly in spidery lines.
He is taking determined but very labored breaths; he is not asleep, and he senses my approach. I think he’s saying something, but it’s not “feeed me”, it’s something else. It’s barely audible. I must hear it.
Carefully, I squat in the muck beside him and lean in. He rolls his whale eye all the way open and fixes it upon me, and I am startled to see within it my own reflection. At the same moment, I make out what he’s saying, shallow and rapid–“pig. . pig. . PIG!”
Penultimate 