The Pigsty

Can you hear them, can you hear them in my room? They sniffle and snuffle and shuffle: sometimes it seems like the floor is alive with them. They are all different colours: they are an ember charcoal black. They are pink too, but not that fluorescent pink like my sister’s Barbie blanket. They are a more mellow pink: maybe a fleshy transclucent pink, like the bottoms of your fingers when you happen to flex them. Or maybe like your lips when you smile too much. There are some that are pink and black: blotches of mottled grey on a pale and vulnerable back. They’re mammals you know, and their bodies, if you look so closely, are covered in fine tufts of hair. Whales are mammals too, they’re also quite hursuit creatures. Which seems like quite a think to consider, don’t you think?

Have you ever looked closely at their noses? They are so marvelous, far better than human noses or dog noses, or horse noses – which scare me a little.  This nose is a wonderous and curious object. Removed from the face, it seems like the most peculiar of objects, perhaps an alien belonging. But then, attached to the face, it is at once endearing and repulsive and fascinating. It is most like my dog’s noise, but it more obtuse and clown-like. They are even more pink, and the pink of the nose is like fairy-floss and marshmellows and whispy dreamy clouds framed in a sunset. They are the colour of musk stick, and even though they always tasted too much like perfume, they were a delightful shade of pale pink. Their nose is moist and covered by miniscule hairs that sniffle and snuffle.

And their tales, they might be my favourite. As I sit I watch them, their whirls of skin and cartilidge that seem not even real. They seem to be from a picture I drew when I was four, because their tales seem to defy physics. And I never did study physics and maybe you did, but surely you must agree. They are such realisations of childhood dreams and plasticine models of curled up earthworms. Do you think they can wag their tails? Sometimes, I stop for the briefest of seconds to imagine what it would be like if we had tails, and I know there are some people in the world with skin protruding from the coccyx – as if a tail, but it is not the same animated living bodypart as a dog or cat has. I think it might be the most profound or the strangest experience to have a tail for a day.

So maybe you guessed it and maybe you knew, because you’re my friend and you’ve visited my house. My room is a pigsty. My mom always used to say it to me with startling exasperation and rage and fluster. She’d say: “Erin your room is a pigsty CLEAN IT UP!” And I would most often shrug and laugh nonchalantly and gaze at the piles of clothing and discarded kiwi fruit and empty mugs perhaps sprouting a questionable white substance. And then one day I woke up from a particularly deep sleep and there was this sniffling and shuffling and a smell that wasn’t quite mouldy coffeecups or degrading fruit. It was something real: it was organic and musty. I opened an eye so slowly and it very soon appeared to me that my room was, in fact, a pigsty, of the more literal sort. It was filled with porcine friends who seemed content and satisfied with life in general. I thought “oh”, and then my pig playmates and I had a great chuckle and snuffle and snort and laugh.