”A Tail of Two Piggies”—#novelexcerpt #amreading #govegan
- Janet Mason
- May 3
- 5 min read
Lately, I've been thinking about pigs. Pigs are wonderful beings--often compared with dogs. They're also said to have an equivalent level of cognition to that of a three-year-old toddler. One of the most wonderful things about my vegan journey (which I started after a critical health emergency, now more than five years ago) is my connection with the animals. (The health benefits are also rather remarkable.) Often, I wonder why I didn't go to a healthy vegan diet earlier in life, but I am so thankful that I was able to make the change when I did.
This week, I’m posting an excerpt from my new novel, A Tail of Two Piggies. The story, with the same title, appears in cc&d magazine v350, October 2024.
A Tail of Two Piggies
Janet Mason
Ours was an era of paradise and one of cruelty. In those days, some were learning that they were just like us. But others insisted on roasting us on spits on the open fire or in ovens because they had always done things that way. But things were beginning to change. The nobles had convinced the proletariat that they needed to eat us to survive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Besides, who wants to be eaten? It makes sense that those who eat us are often eaten themselves by disease, wasted away from the inside out. The nobles had taken what was a good thing—or what they thought was a good thing for them—and made it bigger. Instead of being reared in wooden pens in the open air, we were warehoused and gassed in slaughterhouses.
The slaughterhouses seemed to be insurmountable, but perhaps they would crumble like the old fortresses. In the nursery rhyme, one little Piggy goes to the farmer’s market and finds all kinds of glorious colors, smells, and tastes. Since those tastes are fresh, and the best and most appealing, that little Piggy is very happy indeed. That little Piggy is as happy as a pig in mud. Sayings like that don’t come from nowhere. I know. That little Piggy is me.
I had long imagined the other little Piggy was my brother. But how could my little brother, smaller and weaker than me, have escaped his destiny of the slaughterhouse?
My brother or not, the other little Piggy goes to the supermarket to find something called roast beef, but instead finds his friends from the farm had been slaughtered and shrink-wrapped and sold for humans to eat. How horrifying!
Piggy moved toward a patch of bright pink under the glass of a counter that seemed to be safely away from the flesh of his friends. The exact hue of a fresh pink rose in late spring, the color was rare in nature. Perhaps the block of bright pink tasted good. Piggy was literate, like most pigs, and read the word “ham” written on the clear package wrapped around the bright pink block. Ham was such a cute little three-letter word.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Piggy said, addressing the woman behind the counter.
Her dark hair was swept up into a hairnet.
“What does ham mean?”
The woman’s mouth opened and closed.
“Well, well,” she said sputtering. “I never…” Then she took a breath, regained her composure, and spoke. “Ham is made from pork. It’s a kind of lunch meat. People like it because it’s cheap and tasty. They eat it in sandwiches.”
Speechless, Piggy stood on his rear legs and balanced with his front legs on the counter.
“It’s tasty,” said the woman behind the counter, smacking her lips. “The combination of salt and fat is appealing.”
“Pork?” Piggy asked. “What is pork?”
“Everyone’s heard of pork. It’s what ham is made from,” the woman responded.
“But what is pork exactly?” Piggy persisted, giving her a perplexed look.
“Well…” The woman with the hairnet turned and straightened the table behind her and then turned back around and faced Piggy. She took a minute to speak as she smoothed her stained white apron. She seemed to be stalling for time. “Pork is what sow bellies are made from.”
At the mention of the word “sow,” the color drained from Piggy’s pale pink face.
“Sow!” exclaimed Piggy, “That’s a female me. You could be eating my sister—the one closest to me in my mother’s belly or any of my other sisters. You could be eating my mother, for that matter. Now I get why you call it ham,” he continued. “Ham is just an innocent word. It’s cute with its one syllable and three letters. It sounds like ‘P-I-G,’ like something a spider might weave in her web. Ham might be made from us, but it’s not the same color. We’re paler—all of us is lighter.”
The woman behind the counter hung her head.
“P-I-G,” Piggy said emphatically. It sounds and means Pig, like me. I am a PIG.”
The woman raised her head. Piggy felt momentarily triumphant. He had forced the woman to look at him and acknowledge his existence. He was a pig, not pork or ham. He was not a sandwich.
Piggy went home from the supermarket, weeping all the way back to the farm where piggies used to live. In those days, farms were presented idealistically, but still, the farm seemed different now that Piggy knew his destiny.
I always identified with the Piggy who stayed home. Home for me is now a farm where the people foster pigs and teach them to become companions. The idea is that we pigs are intelligent animals with lots of personality.
A while ago, I escaped from the factory farm with the help of my special human friend, whom I came to think of as my father. I came to love him. I always knew he would help me. I’d like to think that I helped him, too. How couldn’t an animal companion help their humans if the animals brought more love into their lives?
I know the experience of my brood because I dream about the experiences of my siblings. I was born in a large litter. My little pink body, filled with red blood vessels made from my mother’s body, nestled against my warm brother so closely that it felt as though we were one piglet. We were the two little piggies: Piggy One and Piggy Two. Even though I had arrived at a place where I could roam and explore freely; even though I wasn’t destined to become ham or pork or to be eaten by anyone anywhere; even though I could even swim where I had arrived (there was a pond!), I was still haunted by the thoughts of my closest sibling.
We were both part of the whole.
You can read the story on the magazine’s website at:
CINNAMON, my most recent novel, is available on amazon.com: Cinnamon: A dairy cow’s (and her farmer’s) path to freedom: Mason, Janet: 9781958419786: Amazon.com: Books
CINNAMON is also available through your local bookstore and library
(just ask them to order it if they don’t have it).