This Little Piggy
“You know what’s in those vaccines Tiffany?” Amber shouted at her older sister across the Thanksgiving table as she counted on her stretched fingers. “Mercury, bleach, unborn babies, they will NOT be injecting my child with no damned dead bodies.”
Amber had caught the anti-vaccine bug.
“Amber, you can’t believe memes that you see on Facebook!” Tiffany tried to explain to her 9-month pregnant sister, but it fell on deaf ears. “Vaccines. Do not. Harm people!” she shouted over the stuffing, various gravies and slabs of delicious sliced turkey. Their father was more interested in the football game on the TV in the adjacent room to pay them any attention, their mother, on her fourth glass of chardonnay could only interject fragments of sentences at a time.
“Then why is there a National Vaccine Damage Relief Fund, huh?” Amber countered with what she assumed was a checkmate, she confidently crossed her arms over her large belly and awaited her sister's response.
“You know what? Fuck it,” Tiffany countered angrily as she shoved away her plate in disgust and stood up knocking back her chair from the table. “If you want to not vaccinate your kids over some shit you heard Jenny McCarthy say on the Internet, then feel free not to bring your kids around mine.”
“Tiff…Amber...Gregory, are you going to say something?” their mother stammered, trying to calm the situation but it was too late, Tiffany quickly gathered her things, her husband and her children and left the family home.
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As Amber sat crouched in the darkened bedroom, her back pushed tightly up against the door clutching the baseball bat her husband kept at the side of the bed “in case of a robber” she was sobbing and frantic, recalling that confrontation over Thanksgiving dinner, the last time she spoke to her sister before tonight.
Now, her once beautiful, smart and wise beyond her years sister lay dead on her kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Her face chewed and mangled by the ferocious creature that she once called ‘son’.
She had always done everything “right” when it came to little Brendan. When she was pregnant, she ate tons of leafy greens, supplemented with fenugreek and did a twice weekly mommy yoga class to reduce stress. During his birth she rejected the epidural, for at least the first four hours of labor, she insisted on waiting for the baby’s first bath to get all the benefits of the vernix and even lobbied to skip the circumcision until her husband appealed to her that he “didn’t know how to clean an uncircumcised dick”. Throughout Brendan’s first six months, his life consisted of a well-rounded diet of fruits, vegetables, Mozart and an abstinence from overexposure to the multitude of electromagnetic waves that bombard us on a daily basis. They disabled the Wi-Fi in the house, opted against the use of baby monitors and even moved the television in the living room as it shared a wall with the baby’s bedroom.
Not only did she decline young Brendan’s vaccinations, she also declined all standard pediatric visits for the child claiming that the doctor’s office was too “grey and procedural” opting instead for homeopathy and home remedies.
This choice is what led her sister Tiffany to be in her home that night.
Brendan had been fussy ever since he was abruptly woken from his midday nap when his father, Josh, slammed the door on his way out. He and Amber had been arguing all morning. Amber tried everything to get the boy to go back to sleep, but he wouldn’t settle back down for a nap.
“Is you poo poos? Is you poo poos?” She blabbered in baby talk to Brendan as she unsnapped the latches on his onesie to inspect his diaper for “the poo poos”. She figured he had diarrhea and the sopping wet legs of his onesie were a clear indicator that liquified feces had soaked through his diaper.
As she undid the final snap, she stepped back in horror at the sight she saw. It was not diarrhea that soaked the legs of his onesie, it was instead numerous festering boils that oozed a thick viscous pus covering the young boys’ legs. She began to wipe frantically with baby wipes but it only seemed to make matters worse. In a panic she rushed the crying child to the bathroom and ran a bath thinking perhaps his skin had come in contact with something toxic.
As the bath filled and the wailing persisted, the boils continued to ooze the clear viscous goo that separated from the water and shone a rainbow like an oil slick on wet asphalt. With nowhere else to turn and no one to help, she called her estranged sister for help.
“Maybe it’s contagiosum molluscum? Anthony had it when he was a baby, cured right up with antibiotics…” Tiffany suggested after she’d arrived, looking over the young boy. She had four kids and had seen just about everything and although she had not talked to Amber since their blow up at Thanksgiving, she rushed to aid her sister because that’s what sisters do. “You know Amber, I don’t wanna start an argument, but this could be something worse, something, you know, a vaccine could-”
“We are not having the vaccine talk right now Tiff!” Amber interrupted her but she knew she could be right.
Tiffany shrugged and continued inspecting the boy “Maybe he’s teething?” Her motherly detection skills deduced that while the marks on his legs looked horrible, they were not painful to the boy and perhaps there was another reason for his wailing. “Got some whiskey? We could rub it on his gums.”
“Whiskey? You're not giving my baby whiskey,” Amber said in shock.
“All the hippie dippie voodoo home remedies that you’re into and you’ve never heard of putting whiskey on their gums to soothe them when teething?” Tiffany said with a chuckle, “I know Josh has some Jack Daniels in the cupboard, go get it.”
Tiffany was right, there was a bottle in the cupboard and she rushed to get it for her sister. Tiffany poured a bit on her finger and started rubbing on the boy's gums. “Wow, he has a lot of teeth already.”
“No - no he doesn’t,” Amber said confused. Is she messing with me? She thought, as her sister continued rubbing the dark amber whiskey on the crying boy’s gums.
“Here. Feel.” Tiffany grabbed her hand, poured some whiskey on her finger and motioned for her to see for herself.
Amber was shocked and elated as she felt around her son's mouth, her finger running over sharp jagged tooth after sharp jagged tooth that she didn’t recall being there before. As she felt on his lower jaw she yanked her finger out quickly.
“Oh my God! Feel that one at the bottom, it’s huge.” She shrieked as she pointed at the screaming boy. Tiffany obliged and felt around the boy’s lower jaw and where the incisor should be, was something large and hard. Too large to be a tooth.
“Ahh shit. Little bugger bit me…” Tiffany said as she pulled her finger away from the boy’s mouth. “Sharp little teeth drew blood.”
The two discussed possibilities back and forth a few minutes, a conversation that slowly drifted to a life update as the two sisters who had been close for their whole lives rekindled their strained relationship. Distracted by conversation, the pair almost didn’t realize that young Brendan had stopped crying.
The pair simultaneously turned to cast their eyes upon the gently sleeping figure but what they saw instead was a living nightmare. The boy was stiff as a board, his limbs outstretched in all directions, his jaws opened unnaturally wide as two large tusks broke through the gums of his lower mandible spurting blood as they jutted out of his mouth and curled just below his eyes touching lightly against his chubby cheeks.
The sisters were frozen in shock and terror as they watched him go through this hideous metamorphosis. His hair grew long, thick and coarse. His nails grew long and his hand, once a chubby ball, was now hard and muscular. His eyes turned from their soft blue to a deep dark obsidian black.
Without warning the infant leapt from the bassinet from which he lay and latched onto Tiffany’s face with his long, sharp nails and began gnawing away at her. She screamed in terror as she fell to the ground. Amber could only watch in horror as her precious baby boy ripped and pulled the flesh from her sister's face, revealing the bone white skull underneath. Soon her body stopped writhing as her final breaths were drowned in blood.
Even though his Aunt had died, the hideous boy still gnawed and gnashed at her face with the tusks that were protruding from his mandible, grunting and snorting as he chewed loudly on flesh as his mother watched in horror.
“B-brendan?” Amber cautiously whispered.
The infant child whipped his head around with a grunt, his face covered with blood and one of Tiffany’s eyeballs between his teeth with a long red tendon dangling down to her face. Without hesitation, Amber rushed to barricade herself in the bedroom.
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Now in the present, she sobbed and cried. What's happening to my son? She wondered as she gripped the bat tighter and tighter each time the guttural grunts of her baby boy came from the next room.
What if Tiffany was right? Maybe this has something to do with not vaccinating him? She didn't know anyone in “real life” who was anti-vax, only a collection of mom groups on Facebook who shared tons of memes and studies about vaccine damage. Maybe her son was inflicted with some rare sickness that a vaccine could have prevented? Nonsense, he turned into a pig. What vaccine prevents that? She tried to rationalize but the reality was, she didn't know what the vaccines were for or why they were given. She just knew, from a collection of unfunny internet memes, that they were dangerous. Perhaps she was wrong, she thought. Perhaps she had made a mistake.
Her inward reflection was interrupted by the sound of a car door slamming outside the house, it was Josh coming back home. She had to warn him.
“Babe?” He said cautiously as the door from the outside into the kitchen creaked open and he peeked his head in. Tiffany’s car in the drive-way gave him the impression that he had really fucked up this time. “Babe, I’m sorry about earlier.”
“Joshua you gotta get out of here!” Amber screamed in panic from the bedroom, still clutching the baseball bat.
“Babe, I-I didn’t mean what I said, don’t be like this please.” Josh pleaded, thinking his wife was still upset about their petty argument earlier in the day not realizing that their son transformed into a gooey pig monster and had eaten his sister-in-law’s face off.
“Josh you have to get out of the house now! It’s Brendan! Please!” She pleaded but he didn't understand.
“What's wrong with Brendan?” Concerned, he slammed the door behind him and stormed into the house. “Is that why Tiff is here - oh my God!”
He was brought to a pause by the sight of Tiffany laying on the living room floor with her face crudely peeled from the skull underneath. Blood, gore and brain material soaked into the off-white carpet. The sight caused Josh to vomit so hard it brought him to his knees.
“Wh-what happened to Tiffany?” He called through tears but was immediately silenced by the sound of a deep grunt from the hallway. “Amber, I think there’s a wild animal in the house.” He sat motionless, peering down the darkened hallway, his view slighting obstructed by the couch. A snort and another grunt made his body go stiff in anticipation. “Amber, stay where you are! I’ll take care of it.”
Take care of it? He thinks it's an animal! He doesn't know it's Brendan! Amber’s mind raced in a panic at the idea of her husband killing her son. She couldn't let it happen, not to her precious baby boy, so she mustered all of her courage, jumped to her feet and took a deep breath as she prepared to leave the bedroom, but it was too late, the battle had begun.
The sounds from just outside the bedroom door had her frozen in fear. One hand outstretched gripping the brushed nickel door knob, the other still clutching the Louisville slugger close to her body. She could hear the shattering of glass, then the rumbling of bodies wrestling on the hardwood floor. A grunt and a squeal from her son, a moan and a shriek from her husband. And then an abrupt silence.
Amber inhaled and held the breath in her lungs, her ears focused, trying to pick up any noise at all. Cautiously she leaned her ear up against the bedroom door but the silence was staggering.
Silence. Only silence. Is Brendan okay? Is Joshua okay? She pressed her ear tight to the bedroom door, trying to pick up any slight sound of movement. I have to be there for my son, with that final thought she turned the door knob and left the bedroom sanctuary.
As she walked down the darkened hallway towards the living room, she could see the devastation. An upturned couch, a lamp knocked over in the corner of the room, stripped of its shade, the light flashing erratically. Large indentations littered the walls and blood spatter was drying on the ceiling and slowly spinning fan blades overhead. She rounded the corner and was stopped in her tracks, petrified at the horrific scene that caught her eye.
Josh lay dead on the floor, soaked in blood, his midsection ripped open and his entrails lay strewn across the blood-soaked carpet around him. There, nestled quietly in his exposed stomach cavity curled in a ball was Brendan, napping silently sucking his thumb.
He’s a monster! She shuddered, but it was true and the truth brought her to tears, her hand covering her mouth as she squatted down next to the body.
There, alongside the bodies of her husband, her sister, and the sleeping monstrous creature she contemplated a way out of this dilemma. She couldn't let it live; she couldn't continue living herself. The only option was to kill the monster and then take her own life.
She gathered what little strength she had remaining and stood upright, raising the bat above her head, her hands trembling. Amber paused for a second, readying herself for the murderous blow.
Before she could strike, the sleeping figure began to wake. It twisted and turned in its bed of guts and let out a tiny yawn. Its hooves raised to rub its eyes, rubbing away the sleep. Its head turned to peer up at Amber with its dark obsidian eyes before a smile began to break out around the tusks.
“Ma-ma.”
Amber’s arms dropped.
“Ma-ma ma-ma,”
It began to babble and blow raspberries, his meaty tongue sticking out between his tusks. Amber let go of the bat in shock. Her boy had said his first words.
“Awww, did you say ‘momma’?” she knelt down beside Josh and reached her hands out to Brendan, “come here momma’s big boy.”
“Ma-ma,” the boy said again as Amber swaddled his bloody figure in her arms. Small grunts and growls came from him as she sat back on her knees.
He buried his face against her shoulder as she rocked him gently. Slowly she stood up, wandering into the kitchen, cooing softly to her baby as she glanced at the fridge. Stuck on with magnets was her daycare and kindergarten research. A mad giggle bubbled up from her chest as she read it over.
Perhaps, she thought, I should homeschool.
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Dedicated to Zo, thank you for being my muse”
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