Pigs

by Johanna Stoberock

And ignores the first law of thermodynamics—energy within a closed system is constant. It can be transformed, but it never goes away.”

“What is the world if it isn’t a closed system? Pretend for a minute that garbage is the same thing as energy. The world puts its crap out in a bucket on the street for Monday’s pickup and it says that’s the same thing as making it disappear. But it never disappears. All that crap ends up on this island, and we’re nothing more than universal garbage collectors. In a way, you could think of the pigs as transformed garbage. They get bigger and bigger and bigger, but they can’t go away. Imagine what would happen if they did.”

Maybe the rules were entirely different for the grown-ups.

of course the rules were different. If there was anything they could be sure of, it was that the grownups’ world was entirely different from their own.

Anything that we keep gets taken away. Better to feed it to the pigs first than have it taken away by some other means. Better to surrender voluntarily.

pigs admired beauty as much as any of us do.

Just like him to get so entranced by beauty that he’d forget the purpose for which it had been created.

It was time to notice the world he was in. What place was this, that an eleven-year-old, maybe a twelve-year-old kid could wander along a beach, find a washed up old man, and lead him home without anyone coming and telling him not to talk to strangers? Otis pulled his aching self together and rushed to catch up with the child who was acting as his guide.

There wasn’t any control room anywhere, no master plan for a magic island that served as the world’s dump. It just was, and people just knew about it if they thought about it at all, and ships just brought their stuff there as if by instinct.

But on the island itself, where even the idea of perspective did not exist, everything arrived in its particularity. From the island, it was the ships that seemed a single entity. What was discarded was unique. Who discarded it was not.

The children pretended they’d never met Otis. They pretended they hadn’t tipped his wrecked body over the fence. They pretended that their hands were not the hands of murderers, and that they were only doing their jobs. Feed the pigs the garbage. That was their work in life. It wasn’t their fault that the garbage this time was a wasted man. He might as well have thrown himself away.

“He’s a human being,” Andrew said. “He’s not garbage. Even the pigs know that. He’s a miracle. Don’t we have a responsibility to help him? If we don’t act, even when we’re afraid, how can we call ourselves human?” “That’s not what makes us human,” Luisa said. “It’s part of it,” Andrew said. “No,” Luisa said. “It’s just what makes us good.”

What was the world worth if nobody ever explained it?

There he was. Sleeping in the same room with the grownups. Was there really any difference between a child and an adult?