Magnificent Pigs

(originally appeared in Strange Horizons, 2006. The story is also included in the fantasy short story collection, EYES LIKE SKY AND COAL AND MOONLIGHT.)

MAGNIFICENT PIGS

The spring before it happened, I went upstairs and found my ten-year-old sister Jilly crying. Charlotte's Web, which we'd been reading together at bedtime all that week, lay splayed broken-backed on the floor where she'd thrown it.

"What's wrong?" I said, hovering in the doorway. As Jilly kept getting sicker, I tried to offer her the illusion of her own space, but remained ready.

"I was reading ahead because I liked it so much—and Charlotte dies!" she managed to gasp between sobs.

The big brass bed creaked in protest as I sat down beside her. Gathering her into my arms, I rocked her back and forth. It was well past sunset and the full-faced moon washed into the room, spilling across the blue rag rug like milk, and gleaming on the bed knobs so that they looked like balls of icy light, brighter than the dim glow of Jilly's bedside lamp.

"It's a book, Jilly, just a book," I said.

She shook her head, cheeks blotched red and wet with tears. "But, Aaron, Charlotte's dead!" she choked out again.

I retrieved the book from the middle of the room and set it in front of her. "Look," I said. "If we open the book up again at the beginning, Charlotte's alive. She'll always be alive in the book."

The sobs quieted to hiccups and she reached for the book, looking dubious. When she opened it to the first chapter, I began to read. "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. 'Out to the hoghouse,' replied Mrs. Arable. 'Some pigs were born last night.'"

Curling against me, she let me read the first two chapters. After she slipped away to sleep, I tucked the blanket around her then went downstairs to cry my own tears.

My father and mother were farmers. They had been raised by farmers who had themselves been raised by farmers and so on back to Biblical days. They saw my talent for drawing only as a hobby until the age of seventeen, when I proposed that my major in college be an uneasy mixture of art and agriculture. They were dubious, but they were also good-natured sorts (Jilly takes after them) who only wanted the best for me. So they sent me, eldest of their two children, off to Indiana University.

Jilly, a late arrival to the family, was almost six years old at that point and consumed most of their attention, which I did not begrudge her. From the day she was born, she was a tiny, perfect addition to our household, and I loved her.

Three years later, on a rainy September afternoon, my parents died in a car accident and I returned home to the farm to take care of Jilly. A few townfolk felt I shouldn't be allowed to raise her by myself, but when I hit twenty-one a year later, that magic number at which you apparently become an adult, they stopped fussing.

The insurance settlement provided enough to live on. It wasn't a lot, but I supplemented it by raising pigs and apples in the way my parents always had and taking them to Indianapolis. There the pigs were purchased by a plant that makes organic bacon, pork, and sausage, and the apples by a cider mill. I didn't mind the farm work. I'd get up in the morning, take care of things, and find myself a few hours in the afternoon to work in my barn-stall studio.

A year ago Jilly started getting stomach aches so bad they had her doubled over and crying. When I first took her to the hospital, they diagnosed it as Crohn's disease. Six months later, after I'd learned the vocabulary of aminosalicylates and corticosteroids and immunomodulators, they switched to a simpler word: cancer.