“You’re right. It doesn’t. Have you finished my painting yet? Let’s go up, I want to see it.”
Once again the swarm was gone; for the second and last time, Dominguez had chased it away. I led him up the stairs and felt his hot breath on the back of my neck, and knew what would happen to me when he saw it wasn’t there.
THE PIG
BY JOHN SEARLES
Arnold Street
Fort Lauderdale from October to March, Providence from April to September—that had been Charlie and Joy Webster’s plan for retirement. And for the first five years, that plan had worked out just fine. As soon as the air began to cool and the leaves began to turn, the couple closed up their clapboard house on Arnold Street, loaded suitcases into the trunk of their Oldsmobile, and headed south for the Sunshine State. But this year—their sixth since she’d stepped down from her job as a high school art teacher, and he had retired from his work as a high school security guard—Charlie Webster drove home alone to Providence. Beside him in the passenger seat, strapped in by the seat belt, there was only a bright pink, pig-shaped, ceramic cookie jar—a cookie jar he was using as an urn.
Since Charlie was not yet ready to face questions and condolences from neighbors and what few friends they had left in the city, he slipped the car into the garage at the back of the house, then slipped into the back door as well. Normally, Joy called ahead and arranged for a former student they knew and trusted from their days working together at Central High School to come by and use the hidden key to prep the place for their arrival. But since Charlie had neglected to do so, he was left to go down to the basement with a flashlight—flipping fuses, cranking on the water, and sizing up the withered remains of so many unlucky mice that had been snapped in the traps while they were gone. Soon, the house rumbled to life. Baseboards and pipes knocked away, though things remained shadowy inside since Charlie kept the curtains drawn and lights low.
As for that cookie jar, its detachable head had been crafted with an impossibly large snout, flared nostrils, a toothy smile, and googly black eyes. Those eyes stared right back at Charlie as he carried The Pig from room to room. When he sat at the kitchen table eating whatever microwavable meals he excavated from the freezer, The Pig watched him. And when he settled into bed at night, The Pig rested on Joy’s pillow, watching his fitful tossing and turning all night long too. But there was more: somewhere back on the highway, deep in the Carolinas, Charlie had begun talking to The Pig. And now that he was home, he kept up the habit, jabbering away to that watchful face as though talking to his wife. The man’s rambling sentiments could be boiled down to the lyrics of those country songs he liked to listen to on the long drives north and south: You were always on my mind . . . I’m so lonesome I could cry . . . I fell into a burning ring of fire . . . I went down, down, down as the flames went higher . . .
On and on, those strange and sentimental one-sided conversations went, punctuated by bouts of his mournful weeping and long moments of his doing nothing but sitting in Joy’s art room at the back of the house, staring blankly at her flattened tubes of paint and dry brushes, trying to put the pieces together of how it had all come to such an unexpected end. Things might have gone on this way forever, but on the third day after Charlie Webster’s return, he discovered that there was not much more than ice cubes left in the freezer and canned lemon curd and dried beans in the pantry. For that matter, the toilet paper and paper towel stock was dwindling fast and, without his wife around to keep things tidy the way she liked to do, the place was already a mess.