The son and heir (Standalone)

It isn’t so bad living life inside of a tin can. The metallic, rusting walls are as comforting as they are containing; keeping Scutcher firmly penned in, and anything else out. If he shuts his eyes, he hears his thoughts batter against the outside of the pig ark like the steady beating of hail stones. But the orange, crusting tin won’t let them in. The pigs keep him warm, the straw is fresh and dry; who’s to say a boy couldn’t stay here until the end of his days? Across from him, sat on a blanket with her knees tucked up to her chest, Tallow rolls her cigarette all wrong; tobacco spilling out onto the hay, mutters quiet obscenities and tries again. He wonders why her fingers are so flustered and clumsy.

“You shouldn’t smoke in here; t’aint good for the pigs,” Scutcher mumbles glumly into the soft, strangely cold skin on his arms as the smell of smoke reaches his nostrils. He feels around in the darkness, finds her matchstick among all the dirt- still hot at the tip and secrets it into his hand. Scutcher has thought about the farm burning before; the smell of the pigs flesh like his mother’s sausages cooking on reaping mornings, of the crackle of hay catching fire, the arcs slowly collapsing in on themselves like a charred cake and him trapped inside with a throng of squealing bodies. He has thought about it and found the image as liberating as it is horrific.

Looking over, watching Tallow’s face illuminated by the soft yellow glow from the tip of her cigarette, Scutcher sees her expression swathed in shadows; her eyebrows furrowed closely together, burying her eyes into blank unfathomable darkness like the hollow holes carved into a porcelain mask. A sigh, an exhale wrapped around the twisting coils of smoke escaping from between her pursed lips. “Scutcher, just come back in the damn house. You can’t sleep in here.” Her voice is frayed like old lengths of rope, sharp as a carving knife and Scutcher knows his sister well enough to guess that she is tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t leave you just weary, but reaches right down into your cartilage, to the very marrow of your bones and all your most basic tissue. “No more messin’ around.”

Scutcher isn’t aware that he was messing around, but he’s never been very good at getting the joke. There are certain kinds of loneliness that can strike a person deep to the core, and finding yourself in a room full of laughing people while you can only stay silent is certainly one of them. If this is a joke, though, it isn’t a very funny one, surely? Tallow isn’t laughing and there is smoke getting into his eyes, misting over his brain.

Tallow is smart, she’s always been the smart one; touched by the hands of fate from the instance of her birth. It was as though the earth had conspired with her; doing with the daughter the best that it could with what her parents had given her, arranging her into something sharp, as bright as the sun over an ocean of cornfields. Leaving the son in the darkness. But Tallow doesn’t get it; it isn’t so terrible living life inside of a tin can. Everything bad slides across the rounded top of the pig farm and back into the earth. It won’t find Scutcher in here.

But how does he make her understand that? The words will give up and fall away from his mouth like sand slipping through an hour glass the moment he even tries to speak. Scutcher is too tired to try, too weary to fight against the fog any longer. So he rolls onto his side; feeling the crush against his ribs as vivid as a knife in the gut, twisting, tearing, spilling out his innards into the soil. Turns away from his sister, places his hands on a pig lying in the hay besides him. The hairs on its back are white, fine and wispy looking but coarse to the touch.

“Well, eff you too,” she says bitterly from behind his head. There is something lost from her voice; a quality that Scutcher has come to expect from her, a certain sing-song softness directed at him even when she is at her worst mood. Now though, it is nowhere to be found and Scutcher finds he misses it. “Dammnit, Scutcher ;I’m trying.” Listen to the way her voice cracks at the end, becomes high and thin as wires. As though she is on the verge of crying. Scutcher wants to tell her not to try anymore, she sounds tired. Don’t wear yourself out fighting; just let the fog wash over you and learn that it isn’t so bad living life inside of a tin can.

“What do I do? Seriously, tell me what I do to help you.”

And he doesn’t understand what he’s done now to make Tallow angry. Other people, perhaps, but Tallow has always been the only person he can count on not to raise her voice to him. He’s watched her lose her temper countless times before with other people, kick up a fuss like sand in someone’s eyes, pitch herself about like a little windstorm and shout obscenity around the soggy tip of a cigarette.

But never at Scutcher; when they are together it is always autumn in his memory.

Tallow is four, maybe five and can already tie her shoelaces better than her big brother, doesn’t mind stopping out on the farm to kneel down and loop his for him. From the top of the tree at the yard she will grin down to him and say, “You’re my brother, Scutcher!” the syllables catching in the gaps where baby teeth have fallen, as if she has just realised it and is quite delighted by the news.“My best, best brother.” A little girl incapable of anger, a stranger to sorrow. But always so far above him, looking down from the top of that tree, over the hills and to places he can’t follow.

Perhaps she’s bent down to tie his laces one too many times, grown up and realised that he isn’t the best, best brother at all. She doesn’t want to help him; has grown too tired to try. But Scutcher didn’t ask, already knows that nothing can be done.

There is no better way to tell her, no better way to say ‘nothing’ than by saying nothing, Scutcher feels. If he shuts his eyes slowly then all of this will disappear, right down to the last strand of hay. He can hardly smell the pigs now; that musty, earthy smell that tickles his nostrils with the exact texture of their bristling hairs beneath his open palm.

“Fine,” Tallow mumbles. “Fucking, fine.” The rustles as she moves and her voice penetrate the nothingness in the fog that has descended. Her foot finds the edge of the pig ark, sends a kick that reverberates through the tin can like all the bad things trying to get in.

And then she is just gone.

If Scutcher dreams of anything, he doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t want to remember, refuses to remember it, even. That is what the pig ark is for anyway; keeping things like bad dreams kept firmly on the outside. This morning though, there is an invasion of his fortress. He knows it isn’t a pig, not when he feels the thread of a set of very human fingers tangling through his head, invading the strands of his hair. Snapping up, Scutcher’s arms flail until the pain in his ribs rips at him again, pushes out a gasping hiss and instinctively he clutches at his side.

Scutcher’s mother drops her hand as soon as Scutcher jolts awake, lets it hang in the air like a question awkwardly. Mom looks at her fingers with something like disappointment playing on her face, for reasons incomprehensible to Scutcher. “M…momma?” There are similarities between mother and son apparent to anyone; the same cow-eyed stare, heavy lidded eyebrows and thick dark lashes. Scutcher’s mom is more than slightly mannish in body and features, exacerbated with a functional, short hair cut, her shape incredibly square, and her wide shoulders usually hunched over all awkward and shy. In baggy clothes like ugly brown sack cloth, Scutcher’s mom seems large for a woman, but she is all bone and no flesh, collar bone poking savagely through her skin, so hollow that person could carry water in it.

“Bandages,” says Scutcher’s mom, eyes round, flicking nervously around the pig ark. It is day, Scutcher supposes, and the light finds ways to sneak into the tin can- narrow wisps of light that remind him of the way that the sun would filter through the trees in the garden so vividly that it makes his chest ache and his head spin, brings up the overwhelming need to vomit yet again. Scutcher won’t think about the garden, so instead he thinks about the gauze at his mother’s side and the rubbing alcohol beside it.

It was always so strange to Scutcher that alcohol was used to purify when he looked at his Dad. Tip your head back, baby. If that was the case then surely Loomis Tansy’s insides must have been even cleaner than a shiny new penny. This will only sting for a little while, I promise. He finds for the first time that he doesn’t believe her; he is sure that there will be a sting for an eternity. The bandage doesn’t come away easy but his mom is as gentle as she can be, smiles when she holds it in her hand- sickly yellow and angry red stains deep into the surface.

Looking at his mom, Scutcher is aware of the old adage- to a child, their mother is infinitely beautiful, not in looks per se, but in her entire essence. A heart that is always forgiving, an ear that is always patient and a smile that has the whole world in it. Memories of swabbing knees, pushing tissue paper into bloody noses, guiding words and soothing noises are both comforting and chill him to the core. Scutcher thinks of the babies, her babies – wont think her name, stretching syllables that always pull a mouth into a smile-what will become of them and hisses as his own mom swabs at the gash running across his chin.

All at once, he is guilty that she is here to take care of him, draws away from her caring arm and further into the tin can pig ark, sinks deeper into straw and earth.

“Scutcher?” timid at first, she holds out the bandages. “Come on, we have to do this.” And then with a frustrated sigh when he doesn’t dare venture forward again, only shakes his head, “Scutcher!”

How to make her understand that he can’t let her do this now, can’t let her love him the way a mother will always do for their child? But he is too tired to even try, only wearily reaches forward for the bandages, he can do it himself, doesn’t need her for this, Scutcher is sure of it. How many times as a kid had he watched Mom dress dad’s festering old bandage, listened to him bark out curse words and plunge a fist into the table as she hopelessly treated him with disinfectant that amounted a hill of beans in the end- as his father might say.

Mistaking his actions though, Scutcher’s Mom’s eyes widen further, shoulders get squarer as she sends the flat of her palm onto his knuckles, the skin still littered with the small scabbing lines from where the glass had found him on the day which he won’t dare think about. “No!” she says, in the same clipped voice that a person uses on misbehaving dog or a pig trying to get out. “No!” Not like a mother at all, but then again that was what he wanted, wasn’t it…wasn’t it? The sound of the slap hits the tin of the pig ark and echoes in his ears, hurts more than a little old clout from his little old mom really should.

Looking down at his hand, Scutcher pulls it back…”I…I…” he what…Scutcher doesn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think of how he would if he did. Sorry, maybe? It always seems to be sorry.

Instead his mom simply grasps him by the neck, forcibly tilts his head to the side with the same hand one turns towards wrangling a difficult animal.

He can’t make their eyes meet and in that instance he doesn’t feel like a person any more. Just a difficult pig, the kind that needs rough handling.

Or has he just always been like that? An animal dressed up in the body of a boy. Scutcher’s dad seemed to have caught on quicker than the rest of them. All those times he’s wanted to be a pig, because they are kinder, more like a family with their simple lives and he’s been one without even realising it.

And Scutcher can’t even be happy about that. The pig ark seems more flimsy now, weather beaten, eroded down in the corners, filled with holes that can’t be mended. But it’s where he belongs.

Scutcher’s brain works better in binary; it’s always easier to separate the days into twenty four hours, one hundred and forty four minutes, eighty six thousand and four hundred seconds. From that, each of these one hundred and forty four minutes, twenty four hours becomes not only a unit of time, but a unit of currency too. And when your family isn’t wealthy calculating the money wasted in these twenty four hours, one hundred and forty four minutes and eighty six thousand and four hundred seconds is enough to make any person guilty for lying on their back doing nothing but math and moping.

He isn’t fit for it, no one has to tell Scutcher that; the rattling hollow breaths that escape his throat and the intense overwhelming pain that coughing inspires is a good enough sign as any, but math- unlike people- never lies, not even little white ones to soften a blow. It’s something he can do, something that he’s good at and the only thing that anyone has ever counted on him for.It’ll be a comfort, something to occupy his time, like crashing cymbals, stamping feet to drown out the overwhelming intensity of hollow, white noise.

Finding Loomis Tansy out in the yard, seemingly sober as he holds a bag of pig feed in one arm, leaning heavily on his crutch with the other, hopping across the mud is almost enough to send the eighteen year old boy over the edge. If he isn’t there already. This week the world is upside down, black is white, night is day and Scutcher has been turned inside out so that his intestines are trailing in straw.

And yet, it is the brightest blue day he’s seen in a long while, an empty sky but for the looping swallows, black on the horizon like shadow puppets behind a screen, a crane building a nest in a nearby tree from salvaged twigs, and a hand full of crows coming into land at the edge of the farm, prowling for carrion. The great, boiling white glow of the sun is almost mocking for all of its luminescence.

“I can…” he says, starting towards his father, reaching out for the pig feed but Loomis Tansy growls and shoves Scutcher aside with his shoulder.

The sight is a pitiful one, like a fish taken out of the water and flopping uselessly on the land. Loomis Tansy grits his yellowing teeth, pushes forward with everything he has, limp black hair swinging in his face as beads of sweat begin to form. Scutcher doesn’t dare do anything but hang back and watch. Watch as, panting, his father reaches one of the troughs, rips into the bag and, with shaking fingers finally pours in the feed.The pigs grunt happily, unaware of the toil that has brought them this food while Loomis Tansy hobbles to the edge of a pig ark, slides against it and shuts his eyes, chest heaving.

As Scutcher approaches, he hawks up a huge globule of saliva and spits it into the earth, “The girls…” he starts heavily around wheezing breath “…the girls…eh… said you weren’t fit for nothing…your mother insists to me that you’re…eh… frigging catatonic…” Loomis opens one eye and sneers at his son, “That means not moving.”

“I’m sorry, I can manage now, sir,” Scutcher mumbles into the ground. Loomis leans forward, still clutching at splintered wooden leg of his crutch; Scutcher can see his knuckles turning white.

“That’s what I said; kid doesn’t know where the fuck he is or what day of the week it is half the time- I said to your mother; he’s not gonna feel sad bout nothin’,” his voice is low and mocking, mouth twisting into a hideous approximation of a smile.

But Scutcher has learnt not to listen, tune him out and play the possum until his father gets tired and he will, eventually. This time though, he finds that his fist is curling ever so slightly into a ball. Don’t tell me how I feel, he wants to yell out to his father.

But Scutcher is so done trying to make his father understand anything…just anything at all…. that, as always, he does nothing and lets his dad continue.

“Hungry is about as complex an emotion as you can understand, right ,lad? And with you laid up on your sorry ass, we’ll all be feeling pretty hungry come winter.”

“I can manage now.”

Ignoring him, Loomis hauls himself up with a groan and gets right into Scutcher’s face.“Shit, though…he really did a number on you,”, his dad’s breath smells of tar, of something husky and stale, watery blue eyes following the pattern of bruises around his face. He’s swaying on the spot and if Scutcher pushed him the old man would go down easily, like a leaf on the wind. “Strong, was he?”

He doesn’t want to think about it; feels the bile rising in his stomach, her name there at the edges of the fog in his brain.

“And I bet you just hit the ground like a sack of rocks and took it. What a champ. I suppose, though, someone like you gotta get it where you can. Was it worth it, kiddo?” Loomis leers.

Is that the ground spinning beneath his feet? Scutcher is almost certain that he’s going to vomit.

Taking a step forward, Loomis’ face is like the weather turning to a frigid, violent storm.“I oughta beat your ass too, you disgusting little shite,” the old man whispers savagely, spit frothing to the surface of his lips. “But dammit if you aren’t the most pathetic thing I’ve seen in all my life.” It hurts to breathe as deeply as Scutcher has to, but he forces himself to do it anyway, keeps looking down at the ground, face impassive as anything until Loomis huffs and pulls away.

“Dunno why you’re just standin around lookin’ gormless. Work to do,” he says, voice becoming lighter, still heavy though with his trademark cruelty. “I saw a piglet,” Loomis turns to the herd with an expert eye, even Scutcher has to admit that, “Pathetic thing…got the scour…aint thrivin’. Best to be killing it now. That one,” he says, pointing to one of the squealing, feeding pigs that Scutcher knows all too well.

She’s the little pig who’d been born extra, not enough teats on her mother to feed her- Scutcher had carried her around for a whole week after her birth in a blanket. “Peaches,” he says softly, looking at the skinny piglet, feeling a squeeze in his heart, a fist wrapped around it.

“Whatever, kid. Fuck it if you love it so much,”Loomis wheezes, shifting himself on his crutches. “But kill it afterwards. The pig is sick. Didn’t I always tell you it’s kinder?”

“You did, sir,” says Scutcher, heavily. But he can’t kill Peaches, not now. Not this time of all times.

“Goes for people too, if you ask me…sometimes it’s just kinder to kill ‘em off quickly and painlessly,” he slices the flat of his hand across his throat. “But you know what I’m talking about.”

You’re talking about the day I found you hanging in the smokehouse and I cut you down, Dad. That had been after a reaping, Scutcher remembered the flower pinned to his chest as he seized his father’s legs, tried to take off the pressure, fumbling desperately for a knife. When he was fifteen. Three years ago, almost exactly. I remember that; and I felt more than just hungry when I did it.

“Hell…don’t even ask me what I’d do if I was like you,” Loomis chuckles.

Here, Scutcher draws his head up, puzzled.“Sir? What…what do you mean like me?”

“I suppose it was up to us, at the beginning….I sure as shoot knew when you weren’t even two years old yet, but your mother…always had a soft spot for you. Would have been kinder though, wouldn’t it, son? When someone’s that sick. It’s always kinder.”

“I aint sick…” Sick isn’t the word people use, no one ever says sick. It’s just slow if they’re being nice, dumb if they aren’t. Sick means there’s something wrong ,though, sick like his Dad and all the pigs they’ve ever taken out to the smokehouse and gotten rid of because it’s kinder; Scutcher isn’t sick. He’s here, he’s standing up, no one knows more about pigs and math than he does and he can do this. C…can’t he?

Can’t he?

His dad explodes with laughter, til the tears are running down his eyes. “Oh, Scutcher, my boy…my only son….you’re just about the sickest damn person I ever met. And the best part is you don’t even know it!” Loomis Tansy’s hands reach out, rap a knuckle against Scutcher’s forehead in a less than gentle fashion, forceful enough to knock his head back a couple of times “There really is nothing going on in there is there? Shovelling shit’s about all you’ll ever be good for…what a worthless little life you’ve got.”

It’s an excellent parting shot, Loomis is very proud of it and he has every right to be, slapping his son on the shoulder like real fathers and sons do, leaning forward onto his crutch and hauling himself away on his arms and one remaining leg.

“Kill the pig, Scutcher.” Loomis calls, not bothering to turn back as he heads up to the house.

Peaches is still so small that carrying her is easy enough, even if he grips her lightly, wary of being jostled and of the ache in his muscles. For her, there must be a dim memory in it, of the first week of her existence, held in his arms in a blanket damn near ripping off the rubber around the baby’s bottle he fed her from. Judging from the way she presses her nose at his neck, sniffs around with her wet snout and grunts contentedly Scutcher can only assume that this really is the case. She seems so happy to see him that he can’t feel anything but an aching gut wrenching guilt.

Take it easy Scutcher, don’t crash.

The smokehouse has been cleaned thoroughly, it always is, with strong smelling turpentine that lingers and intermingles with the insuperable musky smell of death that might perhaps be only imagined. Hooks hang from the ceiling, stationary in the stale air and the place is as empty and ominous as an open grave.

Everything is stored away and waiting for him, disposable plastic gloves in boxes a hundred pairs or more that cling to flesh like a second wrinkling skin as he slides them onto his hands. Tacky under his fingertips, suffocating his palms, making them sticky sweat. A sharpening a stone for the knives that are held in a battered wooden drawer a little like a school desk, Scutcher can’t bring himself to hang her from the ceiling; she’s too small anyway. Tiny bones, tiny lungs, fragile as dried flowers pressed between the pages of a notebook, he won’t see her upside down, squealing and frightened.

Putting her on the floor, kneeling down and seizing her little pink haunches, Scutcher rolls the pig onto her back which she was only too happy to do, shutting her eyes with bliss as he runs a hand across her plump belly.

She doesn’t understand.

She thinks she’s safe, here, with Scutcher because- why wouldn’t she be? She knows Boy, that Boy brings food, blankets and then the food again. If there is a knife in his hand, she doesn’t know it. Has never felt experienced the cold bite and the sharpness; never seen anything struggle, die, bleed out into nothing but pieces to be discarded or consumed. For Peaches there is no fear, no concept of death. Just a room and Boy and where can the harm be in that?

Scutcher is at a loss, there is no way to make her understand. But he does, easily.

“That’s what I said; kid doesn’t know where the fuck he is or what day of the week it is half the time- I said to your mother; he’s not gonna feel sad bout nothing… Hungry is about as complex an emotion as you can understand, right ,lad?”

It’s Monday, Scutcher is in the smokehouse holding a knife in shaking hands over a piglet that deserves better than this. His heart feels as though it will either burst like an over filled water balloon or wither and die inside of his chest. Either way, it’s broken. So screw you, Dad.

“No,” says Scutcher firmly, puts down the knife and lets out the breath that he didn’t even know he’d been holding. “Not today, Peaches. You’re gonna be fine.”

Unable to even see her still on the floor on her belly, Scutcher gathers Peaches up in his arms and presses his lips to the folds of her snout. The pig snortles like laughter, beady black eyes blinking, blissfully unaware that she is only the second life to have ever avoided meeting her death in the smokehouse. Her and Loomis Tansy, cut down from a noose in the centre of the room.

We would have been better off I’d have let you swing, Dad. Tallow and Mom and me might have been happy, instead of how it is now.

But Scutcher winces as soon as that thought comes to him. Because he can’t seriously be blaming this on Dad. His ability to be utterly cruel is matched only with his talent for being utterly ineffectual; what can a drunk old man with one leg really do worse than the full might of an entire, hate-filled world?

All the same though, Dad is right. Sometimes it is better, kinder to let something sick die.

And where does that leave Peaches? Where does that leave Scutcher?

Looking up to the ceiling, he can see the hook that his father would have looped the knot around. Sturdy enough to hold two hundred pounds of pig, sturdy enough to hold a length of rope and a man. Easily. Even someone like Scutcher can work that one out; can do everything his dad can do, so how could he possibly be the sick one?

And the knot isn’t that hard to do either, just watch.

Scutcher puts Peaches on the ground, tries to imagine up the day, the son stepping into the shoes of the father. There is rope enough in the smokehouse to hang a man twenty times over, but Loomis Tansy has never tried again. Not once- for all of his talk about it being kinder. Is it shame? Or an overwhelming, horrendous fear in that moment between life and death? Did Loomis Tansy look over the edge, into the void and find himself terrified of what he saw. No rest, no bright light. Just horror?

Scutcher has to know. Just stand in that desolate place, take a peek over that edge. Only for a moment.

His father’s hands wouldn’t be shaking as he tied the rope. No, Scutcher imagines an exquisite calm washing over him at that stage, a sense that what he is doing is right, is meant to be. Tallow used to stoop to tie his laces, but in time Scutcher got better at it; it took time and tears, but he got there. Got there with the ropes too, teaching himself after his father got bored of the job. It’s near enough to a single hitch knot, good for binding up fence posts but even so he imagines Tallow’s hands guiding him through the motions. That won’t happen again though; she’s grown tired of him, he just knows it.

Scutcher’s father finishes the rope. Still calm. Still convinced that what he is doing is right, filled with absolute certainty that in the next few minutes he is going to die and finding that thought pleasing. He doesn’t weep; Scutcher can’t see that. But perhaps he drinks…he definitely drinks…there is a dim memory of something cloudy in a Mason jar laying almost forgotten in the rush of roaring emotions . Yes, so he drinks, finds the wooden, three legged stool in the corner and steps onto it.

Still calm, still convinced- but even so, his leg might start to tremble involuntarily, his fingers fumble as he secures the rope to the hook in the ceiling. Scutcher himself doesn’t dare extend his arms to the ceiling, his ribs, but on his toes he can just about manage it, throws the rope over the hook to his level, ties it and pulls it around again. His father would tug down too, to see if the rope is secure, he takes every precaution.v He is sure that these breaths will be some of his last. He isn’t counting on Scutcher finding him so quick.

It’s tighter than he’s expecting, for both Scutcher and Loomis. The rope is scratching and irritating against skin, coarse to the touch, and their imagination feels the rope tightening before it ever has done. Now their hearts begin to pound, looking down over the stool to the grill below, the channel that collects the blood. The shortest drop, the longest journey, the biggest leap. And somehow Loomis takes it.

Why?

He’ll think his use has run out; if he ever had one before. He’ll think of the way that his family has turned away from him, tiring of his illness, growing impatient with his moods. But he won’t blame them for that- he knows that he would only ever be the same in their position too. He’ll lament the fog that the depression and the alcohol have plunged into, resent finding himself in an alien world, a place where he doesn’t fit, like a square peg in a round hole. Lonely and hopeless. The noose will seem to tighten again, as though it is alive and as though it is listening to his every intimate thought.

And then he’ll take the step.

Scutcher feels sick, wants to get down and get his head out of the rope right now. He understands. And the understanding is the worst feeling in the world, for the first time he is glad that he does it so seldom.

Sometimes it is better, kinder to let something sick die. But now is not one of those times. Him and Peaches are going to walk out of here fine, screw everything else.

Lucky Scutcher, he doesn’t want to die…he doesn’t have to. And instead of seeing the precipice, peaking over the edge and into the darkness, all Scutcher can see is the choice that he has. You always gotta choice, he remembers his father telling him all those years ago. Yes, but half the time the choice you have is someone else’s.

It’s Monday, Scutcher is in the smokehouse with a noose around his neck and he feels. He feels a single word and it’s enough to reverberate through his body like a bullet.

Noreen.

He hasn’t cried in coming up to twelve years, maybe more, even. His mom always used to say that he was a quiet baby, sitting hungry in soiled diapers without a word. As if you didn’t know how to get what you wanted, his mom would marvel. As if you didn’t think that I would come. If he cries out now though, no one will come. It’s up to Scutcher to pull the cuffs down on his shirt and dab at his eyes until they are clear.

In all of this, Scutcher has forgotten Peaches, and he looks over to her, pushing her snout against the door. She can smell the outside, the roots and the dirt and her freedom and she wants to be back there.

“Hang on a minute Peaches…just gotta…” Scutcher feels for the knot of the rope, at the back of his head, but lets out a cry as the act of reaching around for it stings at his ribs. Scutcher has to give himself a minute, grit his teeth and gear himself up to try again. Peaches however, begins to grow increasingly agitated, running around in circles, and in an abattoir she’s going to run into something that will really hurt her. Feeling the urgency now, Scutcher steels himself and pulls his arm backwards.

Running along his rib cage, the spike of pain is hot and tearing against bruised, maybe splintered bones. Scutcher yelps, his body convulses and his legs buckle involuntarily. Beneath his feet the stool slips.

The stool slips.

It just slips,

Slips.

Hits the floor with a clatter of wooden legs against the metal grills of a channel designed to catch blood dripping from animal carcasses.

And the world is nothing but pain.

Squeezing at his throat, the rope tightens, pulls against the bandage under his chin, breaks through the thin layer of scabbing and causes it to bleed again. Scutcher notices because he’s been ripped into pieces, choking, gargling, spitting. Each atom and molecule something separate, the building blocks of a person but nothing whole. Just a mass of feeble, terrified matter which is breaking down and doing so with the most extreme of agony.

The sound of rope creaking is portentous and strange, like gnashing teeth in fierce jaws, splintering at the bone and cartilage.

Fingers scrabble for the noose, but he can’t get purchase, can’t slip them underneath and pull when every cell in his body is yelling at him to try. Fear clogs up his arteries, eyes bulge as the room seems to pulsate and twist with each gasping breath that grows fainter and fainter.

And his eyes roll back into his head, hands go limp and he’s just swinging. Not feeling much at all but a mist descending that he doesn’t quite understand.

Someone is screaming, maybe. Scutcher doesn’t know, it’s too foggy.
Maybe he’s dreaming clutching hands at his body, falling through the air and hitting the floor. He certainly can’t feel it. Nor can he feel someone hitting his face.

And then he feels everything. All over and in reverse, choking, gasping, the same tearing agony until he’s in pieces again. Tallow is by his side. A blur of girl and pale skin and dark hair, with a trembling rage and an unending fear in her eyes. “Stupid…stupid…stupid…” she keeps muttering, wrapping her own arms around his neck so tight that it’s suffocating too. “Stupid…stupid…stupid. Why did you do that? Why? You freaking idiot, why?”

He doesn’t think he’ll pass out. Slowly his heart rate is returning to normal. But if he stays conscious he knows that she’ll only wait with him, only keep asking him why. And he’s just too tried to make her understand it. So he lets his eyes flicker shut, feigns unconsciousness just for peace.

And after a little while of rocking, Scutcher believes it too. Lets everything around him just sort of…slip away.

He isn’t in the pig ark when he wakes up.Because he has to wake up, eventually; can’t keep playing dead like a possum; straddling the two sides, standing forever in a noose. He has to pick one, so he wakes up. And it’s hard not to with the look that Tallow is giving him boring into his brain, his very core, powerful enough to wake even the dead and then make the newly animated corpses feel guilty. He’s back in his room, and can only guess how he got up there- the place is the same as it always is, a bed, four walls and little else save for the dresser and the flowers growing inside of old bottles lined up in the window sill.

Noticing he is awake, Tallow shifts, leans in close and for a minute he’s sure she’ll smile and say comforting. But that doesn’t happen immediately. No, first Tallow raises her palm, draws back and slaps him sharply across the face. His head snaps to one side from the force, but aside him that, Scutcher doesn’t do much. She wouldn’t have slapped him if he didn’t deserve it, even if he isn’t sure why. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she says hotly, face twisted and contorted with rage.

“It were an accident,” he mumbles…but she won’t understand. Just sniffs like an angry boar and thrusts a plate into his chest.

“Mom made dinner.”

It’s a pork sandwich. Not ham, it hasn’t been cured- there is no smoky, salty tang on his tongue as he chews. Odd that it should be so fresh, most of the meat they had leftover from last year was long gone, Scutcher knew, had calculated it. And it wouldn’t be slaughter season for a great long while yet, the piglets were still so young. Tallow watched him chew each mouthful with a nod of approval.

“I could sneak you seconds too; Dad killed the ratty little piglet you was with so…”

And then Tallow is looking at her brother with a dismayed sort of expression, though he has no idea why.

Has to take a few minutes to realise that there are crusts and shards of china collecting in the corner of the room where he has thrown the plate and its contents against the wall.

Peaches.

He fights the urge to vomit, feeling parts of her still lingering in his teeth, inside the crevices in his molars, playing on his tongue.

Sometimes it is better, kinder to let something sick die.

But who gets to decide what sick is? What’s healthy? Seems like everyone is hanging on to the edge of a vast precipice with that one, their fingers bloodied and fraying, watching the people around them drop and fall into the darkness. Peaches would have been fine, the scour would have passed and she could have thrived…she could have done…if someone had given her the chance.

Now though…now she’s lunch.

“Scutcher,” is all Tallow can say quietly with a sigh. She’s tired, too tired. Fifteen years old, going on fifty- a world away from the little girl who’d stooped to tie his shoelaces and call down from the branches of the tallest tree on the farm. Everyone is changing, everything else is shifting and moving like an impossible current. Only Scutcher remains, stagnant, the same as he was at eight years old…only…impossibly sad. She threads her hands through the back of his head, presses her forehead to his for a moment before she has released him. It’s as though, in that instance, she’s trying somehow to see into his mind- Scutcher wouldn’t recommend it. No one wants to be stuck in there. Wandering through the fog is exhausting.

“What do I do…how do we get you well?”

If she means the bruises and the battered ribs then they will heal on their own. As for the rest…he isn’t sick. He doesn’t need to get well.

But he’ll never be able to make them understand.

See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone