Eye to Eye
I was never meant to be a farmhand. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work - at thirteen, I could already muck stalls and plow fields as well as anyone my father hired, if not better.
My father knew I was terrified of the pigs. I had seen them tear a rabbit limb from limb and swore I felt their teeth testing the rubber of my boots. He decried my femininity and called me weak, more often than not forcing me into the pen with buckets of slop. I could have poured the kitchen scraps into the troughs from outside the fence as the other hands did, but Pa wouldn’t hear of it. He accused me of putting on airs, thinking myself better than my betters, and forced me to walk among the pigs at feeding time. “You need some humbling, girl,” he’d sneer.
Some of the hired hands laughed with him, as they did today, betting on whether I would flee. I was defiant as always, but the largest pig - a new sow won in a drunken wager - had only one eye and a wicked scar over half her face. Her remaining eye fixed on me, and even the other pigs seemed to give her a wide berth as she made her way toward the trough.
No... not the trough. Me. She was charging at me.
My pride gave way to terror and I whirled back to the gate, dropping the bucket in my haste to escape. The steps between my feet and the wood rails seemed to stretch, and the nettle sting of adrenaline flooded my veins when I saw Pa at the gate, chugging gin and gleefully holding a length of rusty chain around the posts to keep it shut.
“You’re not finished, girl,” he spat, but still I ran toward him. The fence was nearly as tall as I was, but I was skinny and lithe and scrambled over it easily, propelled by my fear of the approaching sow. Atop the fence, I saw she had not slowed at all and barreled on, maw open, splintering the rails into kindling even as her jaw closed around Pa’s forearm. His hand still gripped the chain, and her eye was still on me. I saw her then, as her teeth tore through his flesh and cracked his bone, and knew that she truly saw me.