Sunday April 20th, 2014

The exercise:

Write about: the pig.

Spent some time this morning working in the yard with my family. Max was quite entertained by a bucket of water that he slowly turned into mud, while Kat and I cleaned out weeds and tidied up our garden boxes.

We had Easter dinner at Kat's parents and that was really nice. Good food, good company, good to have a break from cooking and doing dishes.

Oh, I should probably mention that my new team is up three games to none in their first round series. I haven't actually watched any of the games, but I have been following Montreal's progress. They have a chance to wrap up their best of seven series against Tampa Bay on Tuesday night.

Mine:

Sometimes I wonder if the other animals look down on me. I mean, I'm smaller than them, so of course they do. But, like, do they think that they're better than me?

I'm smart, but I'm not very good at expressing myself. I do my best, I really do, and I'm learning how to do things better every day. I guess I still seem pretty stupid to them though.

Graceful I am not. Maybe one day I'll have the easy stride of the horses or the stately amble of the sheep. But not today. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.

I'm dirty pretty much all of the time. I'm okay with that but most everybody else seems to mind. Not the pig, though. At least he seems to get it.

He understands that I'm just a baby.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Sounds like a good Easter! I'd forgotten about it to be honest – the dogs don't celebrate such holidays and chocolate is slightly poisonous to them (so no Easter eggs for dogs!) so it slipped my mind. I did enjoy the time off work though, even if it sounds like you were still working, just in a different part of the farm!
Nice misdirection this morning! I did start wondering somewhere around paragraph 4 if you were going to add a twist, but you got it in there before I could work out where you were going. Great work! :)

The pig
The judging had been called to a halt at Sixticton's Easter farm fair. A large crowd had gathered now, much bigger than the small one that had been watching originally, and Mrs. Lipton had lost no time at all in making them all buy entrance tickets. Her little eyes, set deep thanks to her chipmunk-like cheeks, were gleaming with pure avarice and the Reverend Martinsite was already heading her way to preach a little.
The crowd though was gathering around the judging pens, where Mabel Terwinsky's donkey (aged 7, and two years older than Mabel herself) had won the blue ribbon for most obedient pet five minutes earlier. For the judges, the competition was an easy one: whichever pet didn't attack them was usually the winner, and in the unlikely event of a tie they pulled tails until all but pet had reacted. Now though, they were attempting to judge which pig was prettiest.
"You have to choose Bessie!" The little thug, skinny as a rake and wearing his brother's cast-off clothes (his brother was as fat as lard and the clothes hung on his undernourished frame like a cross-between a scarecrow and a circus clown; in Sixticton it was important, as all folks would tell you, to distinguish between circus- and killing-clowns) was draped around the neck of a plain-looking pig. "You have to choose her, or they'll turn her into bacon!"
There was muttering among the judges at that; there were four other pigs and the prettiest was easily Earl Mount's pig, as it was every year. The make-up and dress made it look startlingly human, some said. Finally there was a consensus, and a blue ribbon was stuck to Bessie's ear.
"Best choice for bacon!" announced the judge in a stentorian tone.

Marc said...

Greg - thanks! I was having a bit of a struggle finding a way to write it that kept it hidden but was still true to what I was actually writing about... so, I'm pleased it worked for you :)

That little side note about the clowns is absolutely amazing :D

Also: I'd have gone with the bacon pig as well. Wise choice, judges.