The Pig and the Owl

“Only the worm of conscience consorts with the owl. Sinners and evil spirits shun the light.” — Friedrich Schiller

“Daddy, Marigold said she’d meet Hank in that old barn!” Alfie said, pointing at the bulk of darkness to their left.

All John saw were the shadowed shapes of trees, dark against the light of a full moon that had risen red that night.

“What barn, Alfie? Is this another one of your lies?” John said, stopping to catch his breath.

“But daddy, I am not lying.” Alfie grabbed John’s much larger hand, the one missing the pinky, with both of his own, and pointed it toward the moon. His little hands glowed in the semi-darkness like two pink blossoms. “Over there.”

Against the brilliance of the moon, which had transitioned from its earlier crimson glow into the white-silver pallor of death, John saw the sharp angle of a pointed roof atop the irregular skyline of the forest. Easy to miss, but Alfie was right: it was a barn.

“Let’s go,” John said, pulling on the boy’s little arm. With his free hand he fought the density of leaves and branches that stood between them and Marigold’s apparent hideout. “If she is with that boy, I swear to God I’ll break her neck.”

Soon they came upon a clearing that rose into a slight hill where sat the ruins of a large barn, strangely familiar. The thought of Marigold in there alone with that Hank boy urged John forward. Dragged behind him, Alfie whimpered. “Don’t be a sissy now, Alfie boy,” John scolded.

The barn’s doors hung closed, slightly off their hinges, but neither would budge. Barred on the inside, John thought. Noticing a dark opening next to one of the doors gave him an idea.

He turned to Alfie and lifted him by the waist as if the seven-year-old were made of air; he placed Alfie on a large crate sitting under the opening. “Crawl in through that hole and lift the bar from the inside.”

“Daddy, it’s dark in there. I—“

“Don’t you be a sissy now, Alfie boy. Do as I say or I will throw you in head first.”

Reluctantly, Alfie dragged his feet into the opening, sliding his little form through until his little head disappeared. John heard the rustle of little feet trying to find something to step on.

Then a loud thud.

“Alfie?” Had he pushed him too far? His own father had always pushed too far, once even breaking John’s leg with a baseball bat for swinging it like a girl batting at butterflies. “Little sissy,” he had called him.

“Alfie!” John called again, climbing onto the crate and sticking his head into the opening. The interior was quiet and stale, like Fern’s womb after her first miscarriage. He punched around the opening, enlarging its diameter by a few inches, enough to push himself through. Ragged wood dug into John’s flesh before he dropped heavily onto the barn floor.

“Alfie. Where did you go?”

He reached into his back pocket for his cell, hoping to use its flashlight, but found it missing. “Shit!” No matter, as the moon in her ceaseless crawl across the sky was beginning to cast a long beam through a small upper window, lighting up the barn with cold white fire.

“Alfie!” He called again, not seeing his son anywhere near the door.

The inside of the barn was now a dream-like geometry of rectangles of deepest black, punctuated by the growing circle of moonlight, but no Alfie.

Across the breezeway stood a ladder leading to what must be a loft, a large rectangle of black nothing above the horse stalls beneath.

Not completely black, though. Blocking the blinding blaze of the moon with his hand, John noticed a green glow in the impenetrable darkness of the loft. Marigold’s cell phone? He wondered, although its light should be blue instead of that sickly green. Was Alfie up there too?

Angered, John walked across the breezeway, passing through the moonlight beam just as a shadow blotted its silver light. The sudden darkness felt like one of his habitual blackouts, but he remained conscious, especially when he heard the muffled flutter of wings.

Startled, John turned to the upper window. A large owl descended upon him like the angel of death, the moon its halo, its cry an inhuman screech from the underworld.

Instinctively, John flung his arms over his head in the age-long posture of self-preservation from winged predators, sprinting for the ladder.

Sharp talons gouged into the flesh of his forearms. Desperately, John scanned the ground, hopeful when he saw a broken wooden post about the length of a baseball bat. In one fluid motion, John crouched, grabbed the post, and swung it at the damned bird, hitting it on the side forcefully enough for the talons to disengage from his arm.

As the bird flew away, John stumbled to the ladder and hid behind it. Up in the window sat the damned bird, his face the ghastly heart-shaped mask of a barn owl.

John had hated birds since he had lost his left pinky, crushed by his father’s cockatoo, then infected and amputated because only sissies went to the doctor for a flesh wound. Some pig, his dad.

Barn owls he hated more because one had taken his favorite kitten when he was twelve. “I thought owls hooted,” John had cried to his father that day, but the man had laughed, saying that barn owls didn't hoot, but screamed at little pussy-boys who should have nothing to do with kittens.

The sound of muffled giggles from above drew him from the recollection. Looking up, John saw the eerie green glow spilling down through the slatted spaces between the floorboards of the loft.

“Marigold? You little hussy. Get yourself down here right now.” The giggling stopped, but the green light continued to move around aimlessly.

“Alfie, you too.” He called again, but all he heard was a hissing coming from the owl in the upper window, its ghost face fixed on John.

Damn you bird.

John got on his feet and climbed up the ladder, his forearms bleeding from the owl's handiwork. As he ascended, he checked on the bird, motionless for now, until he emerged into the darkness of the loft, where John distinguished nothing except the single green light, concentrated on the far sidewall.

Not a cell phone, he concluded.

The green light reminded him of the mysterious green flash he saw on the horizon the last sunset he spent with his mother on the shore of the Pamlico Sound. “A sign of good luck,” she had said, and yet she had left them a week later for some writer from Durham, only to be hurled down his mansion’s staircase by him two years later. Good luck, indeed.

The green light in front of him, though, was now brightening and disintegrating into a hundred points of light. Fireflies. The air was soon filled with tiny specks, each speck a firefly sailing toward the open window where the owl sat.

Except, the owl was gone.

Panicked, John lifted himself up onto the loft, taking tentative steps toward the spot the fireflies had come from. The owl hissed somewhere in the dark, but John moved forward nonetheless, dragging his feet slowly so as to not trip.

His foot kicked something. Picking it up, he realized it was a cell phone. He brought the home screen to life, shocked to find the picture of himself next to Marigold at the Father-Daughter retreat in Camp Caraway years back.

A crunching sound ahead took him from the image. John quickly activated the flashlight and aimed it at the sidewall.

The owl sat in a large nest of hay, frozen in the circle of light, its ghastly eyes staring daringly at John. From its beak hung the head of an owlet, its lifeless body swinging back and forth, hanging by a thread of flesh.

John stepped back slowly, keeping the light on the owl, its nest strewn with broken eggshells, tiny rodent bones, and a second, older baby owlet, mostly decomposed.

Some owl, he thought.

His next step stretched back into emptiness, throwing him off balance. The cell phone dropped as John brought his foot back onto the ledge.

There was motion in the darkness. Before John could step on the ladder, the deadly talons were already on him, yanking him by the scalp, pulling him toward the twelve-foot drop.

John imagined what his mother must have felt at the moment she fell to her death in the Durham mansion of her author-lover turned murderer. Before he plunged into unconsciousness, he saw the moon receding from the window above, followed by a flash of green firefly light. A sign of good luck, he thought.

*****

John opened his eyes and found himself lying on the carpet of hay, the barn alive with the warm glow of the early morning. The window above was empty: no bedeviled owl. Had it all been real? But when he tried to get up, the pain in his right leg was only too real.

By his feet lay Marigold’s cell phone, evidence of the reality of the previous night. He grabbed the phone and stood up, using the side rails of the ladder for support.

A screech rang in the distance. Not the owl, he realized with relief, only police sirens.

But something more remarkable stole his interest. The barn doors were wide open, morning’s light spilling into the barn, beckoning John forward into the clarity of day.

As he limped to the exit, his leg exploded in pain.

Then came the faraway voices.

Alfie? He pictured his son dead on the hay, eyes gouged out by the barn owl, blood running down his cheeks like tears. “Daddy, no. It hurts.” He thought he heard, but it was a faint echo of memory.

Or, Marigold? He saw her fourteen-year old naked body wrapped around a dead Hank like Eve around the slithering snake.

“No, Daddy. Please don’t. I'm still a virgin.” He heard Marigold distinctly. “I didn’t do anything with Hanky. Daddy, it hurts.” He shook the image, realizing that instead of Hank’s face, he was picturing his own.

At the entrance, something caught his attention. Stretched across the upper part of the doorway was a big spider web, and hanging from the top of the web, head down, was a large grey spider, long dead.

Diamond droplets of morning dew sparkled on the spiraling web, highlighting writing of some sort. Impossible, he thought, but unmistakably it read, “Some pig.”

“Some pig,” he said, accepting the accusation.

He unlocked Marigold’s cell, surprised that the code was still his birth year. Did she love me in spite of it all?

He messaged his wife:

Fern. This is John, your husband no longer. You and our unborn child are free, the cycle broken. Alfie and Marigold were not so lucky; it was my nature, my father’s nature, the nature of those men before me: abusers and sometimes monsters. No more. Don’t name him after me. Choose something kind, something I would hate. Wilbur, maybe, like the pig in that fable? But what do I know; I am the stuff of nightmares. Good-bye, Fern, my drop of summer, good-bye, good-bye.

John held the phone to his side and walked toward a road that hadn’t been there last night, filled with police cars, all guns trained on him.

“Hands up,” someone shouted.

Instead, John raised the hand with the phone, pointing it at the cluster of vehicles. By the time he hit SEND, a bullet had already torn through his heart, a pained screech emerging from his lips as he collapsed.

In the distance the sun rose red and radiant, preceded by a short flash of green light that no one else would see that morning. A sign of good luck was John’s final thought before his mind receded into black night.