2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College
2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College
2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College
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William the Pig<br />
by Ariel Gore<br />
The Lehman’s had this pig in their back yard. A pet pig named<br />
William the pig.<br />
I wasn’t really friends with those Lehman kids. They had sandy-colored<br />
hair and buttons for noses. My mom was friends with their mom, with<br />
Libby Lehman. They were in poetry group together. “There’s a darkness<br />
to Libby’s poetry,” my mother said, but I was just straight-up jealous of<br />
those Lehman kids ‘cause they had this big pinkish-greyish-black<br />
William in their back yard, and that pig was so cute and a little bit<br />
hairy—you know, sort of peach-fuzzy like pigs are.<br />
“I wish I had a pig,” I sighed to the older Lehman girl. She was my<br />
sister’s age, maybe, tall and pretty.<br />
She didn’t answer me, she just shook her head and shrugged, like<br />
whatever.<br />
But then one day we went over and Mr. Lehman wouldn’t let me go<br />
in the back yard to see William—he just tugged at his beard and shook<br />
his head. And Libby Lehman set the long dining room table with the<br />
good silver and she served us pork chops for dinner, with dark sweet barbeque<br />
sauce. And I played Tinker Toys in the shag-carpeted den with<br />
those Lehman kids.<br />
It was maybe a year after that when the phone rang at our house too<br />
early and it was one of those Lehman kids, voice shaky and too highpitched<br />
so I handed the phone over to my stepdad who used to be a<br />
Catholic Priest before he got excommunicated for marrying my mom.<br />
Mr. Lehman, it turned out, had accidentally shot Libby Lehman in<br />
the chest while he was cleaning his gun that morning and no, they<br />
hadn’t called 911 yet, they needed a priest, not a paramedic.<br />
That seemed like a strange story, but my stepdad the priest put on<br />
his wool beret and my mom the poet put on her coral red lipstick and<br />
the back door to our house slammed behind them and Libby Lehman<br />
was dead.<br />
When my parents got home, my stepdad said, “I don’t think that was<br />
an accident.”<br />
<strong>Santa</strong> <strong>Fe</strong> Literary Review 33