Pig Roast
The dead pig, a grayish pink shriveling thing stenched in raw, decaying carcass and stiffened into an eviction of life was smothered in a six pack of beer that Danny called basting, swallowed up by a shallow grave filled with lit coal. The decimated animal was then packed in dirt by Danny, Jerry and Arthur smacking their boots into the butt of the shovels, groaning and cursing through hangovers as another load of dirt was dumped in the hole maybe two feet deep by four feet wide, the depth of a meteorite if it had plummeted through the roasting debacle of their brains.
Danny had pitched a tent nearby to hold vigil for 24 hours to keep the wolves and coyotes away that didn’t even exist in our small Midwestern town. This meant that once Jerry and Arthur left, Danny and I were going to have sex. I was there to keep Danny pitched and howling over the sounds of the only animal I encountered besides him that night, the wind. Whiskey reeked through our pores as we wrestled around that pup tent pushing and pulling at skin that created friction and heat, reined in by the coffin terrain of our sleeping bag. We knew what it felt to be prowlers inside someone else, but whatever body parts were wet and accosted by us that night were dried out in the morning with our brain cells and the empty bottles.
When the light slashed through our tent we tried not to see the hollow bark of each other’s face. Danny wriggled into his pants. “Got to make sure the pig is still secured,” he said.
I knew it wasn’t.
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Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Berkeley Fiction Review, 34th Parallel, Epiphany, One, the Journal, Monkeybicycle and Boston Literary Magazine. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is the fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. She is the author of Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, Implosion (2013) Sententia Books and her chapbooks, Disparate Pathos,(2012) Monkey Puzzle Press and Reverberations (2012) Deadly Chaps Press.
She has a monthly column, Exquisite Quartet, published up at Used Furniture Review. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology-2011 is available.
Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com.