Pearl

by Josh Malerman

The mind-bag. The secret, unseen place where Sherry stuffed all her dark thoughts, her absurd worries, the unprovoked hunches she’d felt most of her life, the premonitions of Pearl.

The gate is open, he seemed to be saying. And I’m the farmer. Like he was saying I’m the farmer now, too.

A new and better world. Where invisible men took photos of great legs and the gay kids were stronger than the straight ones.

“Help us,” the blond girl said. “HE’S GOING TO KILL US ALL!” And Sherry, without meaning to betray her worst fears, without asking the horrified girl to clarify her crazed statement, said, “But how? He’s only…only a pig.”

But he said something else, too, something that scared Sherry so deeply that she invented, on the spot, a place inside herself to tuck such statements, such connections, away. Eventually she’d call it her mind-bag.

Yes, in a way, Grandpa had driven Pearl insane. Just like every farmer in America had driven every pig in their pen insane.

Bob knew that only assholes wore sunglasses indoors.

Standing still was out of the question. Standing still was what scared people did. They froze. They stared. They pointed and they stuttered and they couldn’t move because they’d given all their power to what they were afraid of. Easily, too. All the horror had to do was open its palm and wait.

suddenly Susan was seeing, seeing Pearl’s point of view, Pearl’s perspective as if Pearl was a slave rising up, rising up from the mud and blood to kill his captors, to slay those who slayed his mother, his father, big pigs who had their own purpose not to be slit or slayed by men like this,

“We’re going to be okay, guys,” she said. “We just…we just experienced something really fucked up. But we’re going to be okay. I know we are. I can feel it that we are. We’ve been through something, and that means we got through it. Do you know what I mean? Some people wouldn’t have and some people couldn’t have, and we did, and that means we’re going to be okay.”

you could make people do things as long as you made them want to do them, as long as you made them believe they were the ones who wanted to do them.