by Justin Varava

In a deserted area behind a bisected khaki-brown vista called “The African Steppe” there is a single dilapidated pen with a faded wooden sign that reads simply, “The Captain.” In the far corner of the pen, heaped in a massive grey bundle of skin and nestled against a crooked post strung with barbed wire, sleeps a gigantic pig.

The top of the Captain’s back has thick black hairs coiling out in a V pattern. He breathes in erratic intervals as hundreds of horseflies dive bomb scattered piles of his mealy-green shit. There is a dry, brown leaf caked in mud that sticks to the end of his snout and flutters while the air whistles in and out.

Years of sunlight and exposure have drained the pigment from the Captain’s slow, sad eyes and bleached them to a dull, cloudy grey. The loss of colour is something I have always associated with old age. My own father’s chest hair turned brittle and bone-white almost immediately after his sixtieth birthday. His lips, too, eventually faded to match the colour of the rest of his face, creating the awkward illusion that they  had vanished completely. I suspect the Captain’s insides have similarly degenerated over the years from red and healthy pink to watery grey and I figure that with the proper means—a fork or a straightened clotheshanger—I might be able to poke through his thick skin and confirm my suspicions. As the Captain grunts and digs his face into his muddy trough, I lean against his planked enclosure and picture his insides running out of him in a rivulet of mercury, turning the floor of his pen wet and dark grey around him.

Lunch is overpriced and light—a soft pretzel and a lime Italian ice—and afterwards I stop in front of an outdoor aquarium and watch as two leopard sharks swim in restless circles while, above them, a zoo handler prepares to dump a bucket of anxious, flopping chub mackerel. I turn away just as he tips the side, and listen to the subsequent screams from three delighted, highly decorated boy scouts.

Two tanks down, seven manatees bob and rotate much less eventfully, like buoys, sliding slug-like down cement sides and undulating in slow, exaggerated waves. Occasionally, one bumps the finger-smudged Plexiglas and this is enough to elicit gasps and polite, thankful applause from the modest smattering of spectators. All seven of the manatees move similarly, turning and swimming at the same speed, all governed by a set of instincts specific to their species. Still, with each air bubble that slips past the whiskered lips and escapes frenetically to the surface, I can’t help hearing the familiar sound of the Captain’s raspy grunt. In each lazy thrust of fleshy rudders and each ripple of manatee hide, I see only the slow movement of a swine.

Fourteen years earlier, I asked for a pot-bellied pig for Christmas. I had read magazine articles about this—a new fad made popular by a number of eccentric East Coast widows who had suddenly and collectively found the ownership of cats and dogs to be unsatisfying and blasé. That December was unseasonably warm. I assembled our tree by myself in the living room, while my father sat splayed on a nearby couch, passing in and out of an apneic dream. I was ten years old.

“Dad,” I said, picking assorted aluminum branches from an old cardboard box. My father’s eyes were closed and his breaths came out tight and strained.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said without looking up. His eyelids fluttered and his tongue flicked the corner of his mouth.
“I know what I want for Christmas,” I said.
“I’m sleeping, Eugene.”
“I want a pig.”
My father opened his eyes finally, ran a hand over his thick, whiskered neck, and looked at me as though examining me. After a considerable silence, he nodded slowly and sadly—in a way that had become typical of him—and pretended I hadn’t said anything at all.

Justin Varava was born and raised in Illinois. He has since moved to California in reckless westerly bounds.