ABBIE DOLL

E-I-E-I-O

Our parents-to-be left for the hospital with no reason to suspect they’d be coming back with anything other than their precious newborn babe—flesh fresh from the womb, ripe with life. But what they got was a whole sack of russet potatoes; okay, okay a litter of spud-similar piglets worth their weight in Irish Gold. They were babes in a sense, just less baby and more ’95 Babe-like.

Insofar as the labor itself was concerned, those bubblegum-pink Tic Tacs certainly made for a smooth delivery—more bowel-like than birth-like, you might say—but the barnyard shock of it all still took its toll. “Unprepared” didn’t even begin to capture this oinker of a predicament.

It was baptism by fire. Barn fire. Great-Chicago-Fire-of-1871 style.

The other piggyback hiccup here (besides the whole birthing-a-different-species thing), was that Mommy and Daddy had but one name picked out—one. Pauline. Which lucky for them, turned out to be an oddly fitting name for a pig, so they mud-stuck with it. The name drought wasn’t quite as bad as they’d forecasted, though; to add to their (mis)fortune, only two of the twelve piggies survived that first week. In between our newly baptized parents’ bouts of scheduled grieving—everything was scheduled now—they slipped into the blame game. Fought hoof and heel over whose fault this mess was, clawing each other purple over a score that refused to be settled.

They couldn’t agree on anything, including the name to bestow upon their second survivor. They tiptoed around the idea of Pigpen, but that was too on the snout, and besides, already claimed in comic-strip fame. Amidst their fresh hallucinatory fatigue, genuine consideration was given to lifeless names, such as “the other one” or “it.” Truly, they considered them. This name thing was just another box to check. They prayed that God might spare them, letting the second pass like its piggy brethren and sistren.

But in the end, they were stuck with two, and our new parents opted against those heartless monikers—despite the devastation they felt from having expected, and very much preferred, a human child.

So Poutine, it was. A not-quite name for a not-quite child.

Perfect.

***

Difficulties and abnormalities aside, Pauline and Poutine grew to be thick as thieves (and as rotund as bathtubs). The two got along like gooey brown gravy and rubbery chunks of cheese curds piled high on a greasy bed of sizzling fries. Well, okay, almost. But no one got along that well; poutine was a flawless marriage of flavor concocted deep within the pearly culinary gates; it was a gristle-tough namesake for anyone to live up to.

By age two, P&P had ballooned into a pair of chubby little porkers, more pot-bellied pig than toddling kiddos, but surely there was some human in them. Not much, but some. They spent most nights in their sagging cribs snorting at one another from across the room—their communication linked like supernatural sausage.

Hoggy Mommy and Daddy, meanwhile, still harbored a fair amount of cured resentment toward their little bundles of pork, but thrice-a-week therapy kept them in a mostly appreciative mindset. They still got to be parents, which was what they had wanted more than anything, and Pauline and Poutine were happy. For now. That would have to be enough. No point in making a fuss over the rest; voicing their dissent wouldn’t change a thing.

***

By four, Poutine was beginning to form feelings of the rebellious sort; most of all, he resented his containment, resented being sequestered away from the rest of society. This preteen mindset of his was premature and unwelcome; parenting a pair of pigs was hard enough.

But his bitterness and angsty woes continued to grow in tandem with his zeppelin belly. And so, the afternoon of his first—some might say inevitable—attempt at escape came and went like an oink in the wind; the lardy lad tried to scramble up their chain-link fence but soon fell and toppled. Plopped down. Face-planted and squealed, poor thing. Now, while the resulting wounds weren’t what you’d call serious per se, they did nothing to diminish his swine-like appearance. Strengthened it, in fact. By the time his facial abrasions had faded, his sniffer had officially crossed the line into snout terrain; the thing was a fleshy, delicate pink with smushed edges like a wad of mangled Silly Putty.

Pauline, who on the other hoof, preferred the safety that their backyard enclosure offered, found the whole ordeal hilarious.

—until her ears started to sprout like crops, jutting out from above her jowls like a pair of minivan side-view mirrors. But she’d always been a little more self-conscious, a little more appearance focused.

Alas, such physical developments further muddied the ins and outs of parenting human-pig hybrids. Ma and Pa, who were doing their damnedest to embrace this denim overalls, pitchfork-in-hand lifestyle, struggled to soothe their porcine offspring—oddities and all. Parenting these two was never not a chore. But they gave it their best effort, tried to foster a gratitude-grounded mindset. With so much of their dignity already lost, Ma and Pa tossed caution like feed. Chucked all their chips into the proverbial pigpen.

***

When a formfitting opportunity knocked and presented itself—perfect for their particular predicament—Ma and Pa answered with relief-flooded grins. A junk mail ad for the state fair snagged their attention one day, and when the tents and trailers rolled into town that summer, they couldn’t not enter P&P in the livestock competition. It was too good a chance to pass up. A chance at positive publicity. The articles that had surfaced so far had been nothing but tabloid horrors with a circus-freak focus. Unkind, to say the least. No one had served their story with so much as an ounce of justice. So far. But this could be a chance at getting the recognition that the whole family deserved—especially Ma and Pa, who never missed a chance to remind their piggies that this pigsty life was not what they’d signed up for when they’d gotten pregnant. And aside from the notoriety, they secretly hoped their chipped teacup aberrations might bring in some much-needed piggybank funds. ‘Cause if there’s one thing people love, it’s a scandal on display.

So Ma and Pa swallowed their shame, washed it down with bulging gulps of bourbon and signed ‘em up.

***

They didn’t know it then, but that haylofty decision would prove to be the culmination of Pauline and Poutine’s child-to-livestock transformation. Ma and Pa got lost in the waist-high weeds of preparation, got lost in the ridges of P&P’s bat-wing ears and winding cavernous nostrils; they trimmed every last unruly hair, led by their steadfast determination to get these pigs prim and proper. Presentable.

They spent hours scrubbing away at the all-too unctuous folds of their offspring’s skin-pink hides. Grooming became a serious endeavor—a full-time job only the garden hose could hope to tackle. Pauline and Poutine were already a hundred pounds and counting—long gone were their palm-able pork pie days. Somewhere along the way, Ma and Pa reduced their parenting duties to the strictly physical; cognitive basics—things such as education and emotional development—were cast aside like umbilical cords and afterbirths, forgotten in their post-birth uselessness.

Despite Ma and Pa’s narrow-minded-yet-devoted efforts, the pigs always felt filthy. There was always more to groom, more to detail, more to polish. And on and on and on. The worst bit—by far—was scraping those cemented crusties off the grooves below their marbly eyes; but Ma and Pa continued to chisel away anyway, applying as much elbow grease as they could muster: stripping off the drippy debris like it was day-old grits caked onto a cast-iron pan.

They worked and worked and worked. Getting these pigs fair ready was their sole ambition; their livelihood and survival as a family—not to mention their mental health, everything, all of it—depended on the success of this mission.

And all through the in-depth prep, P&P merely grunted their thanks. Then after they’d wait beside their troughs, hungrier than ever, drool running down, down, down their freshly wiped chins.

***

Despite the spring-cleaning montage, despite the herculean effort, despite the misguided-but-heartfelt resolve, no ribbons were won that year. Or any year thereafter. The judges couldn’t determine what they were looking at; they weren’t quite pigs, definitely weren’t human. Some in-between thing that easily earned the stamp of disqualification. One guy was so disturbed by the sight of P&P that he swore off pork for good. And we’re talking max consumer consumption here; this was a man accustomed to ten strips of bacon for breakfast, a Fuji-sized heap of pulled pork at least twice a week, a glazed ham every holiday, not just the biblical ones. You name it, he ate it. Another one of the judges hurled in a corner and covered it with hay; tried to blame it on too much rye whiskey from the night before, but they all saw the sight that spurred it.

***

Ma and Pa were at a loss. They couldn’t send Pauline and Poutine to school like this, couldn’t even be seen out in public with these nightmare-inducing genetic mutations. They began to consider the darker side of things: whether or not they ought to just slaughter them and start over. It was more butchery than murder, right? Family do-over. Everyone makes mistakes. Surely, they could try again. Surely, the authorities would understand. But if they went that route, their future was even less of a guarantee than it was now.

Hell, there was no escaping the distinct possibility that something even stranger might pop out of Ma’s pastoral womb. Such a shuddery thought.

***

When the twins turned five, they started walking on their knuckles like hooves, abandoned their bedsheet shirts to let their bellies hang out. At this point, they’d become blimp-like lumps, barely mobile. Drool drizzling down dirty chins in a constant leaky stream. Poutine started to look meaner than mean. Hateful even. His forehead folded over into one hell of a glare of a stare, and Pauline’s paunch was looking more and more like a globe with the positioning of her continent-mirroring spots.

Ma and Pa kept at it though. What else could they do?

They stripped belts from their closets for collars, tried to drag their bloated barnyard mutants out of the house for a bit of exercise. Sunday family excursions to the park were such a stop-you-in-your-tracks spectacle; they felt the weight of everyone’s gaze, practically waited for neighbors to show up at their door with pitchforks and torches ablaze. Ma and Pa tried. Lord knows they tried, but P&P weren’t having it; as their girth grew, so too did their stubborn demeanor. And yet, the doctor insisted; that’s about all he’d say. They need to move. As if he couldn’t see a pair of pigs, just a couple of chubby kids who couldn’t keep their grubby little mitts out of the cookie jar—a painfully ordinary parenting dilemma that Ma and Pa would’ve killed for at this point.

Poutine was getting so big he couldn’t even fit out the front door anymore. It looked like he was lugging a dozen bowling balls in that ginormous gut of his. He was a whale of a pig now.

Pauline continued to be the sweeter of the two. To their surprise, she clung to her humanity through literary pursuits—always chiseling poetry in the mud with a stick stuck between her teeth. Sure, her efforts got washed away every time it rained, but she never cared all that much about the longevity of her work. It was more about the act of creation, the act of preserving the pocket of person contained within. Not only preserving, but putting her out there on display. Proof of her humanity. And in that sense, she was a true artist. But her animalistic side was stronger, and there was no resisting its urges. Half the time, when Pauline finished a piece, she’d plop down and roll in it, reverting her sloppy stickmanship to dust and dirt—doing a full demonstration of the creation cycle, in which destruction would always play an equal part.

As touched as they were by their daughter’s writerly hobby, Ma and Pa started to harbor a light suspicion that Poutine was planning world domination. They’d never know for sure, but the concern was there. Unlike Pauline, he’d never mastered his ABCs; hell, he could hardly walk now. They spent most nights kneeling bedside, praying that this abomination they had unintentionally created would prove to be harmless. Would prove to cease, someday.

***

And on and on it went:

With an oink-oink here, and an oink-oink there.

Here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink-oink.

They never ditched the baby things, the baby dreams, but somewhere along the way, they came to embrace their quirky, oinky reality: painted the house a bright barnyard red, started some crops, went all in on this farm-centric life they’d never craved, muck-stuck to the ugly underbelly of their idyllic façade.