2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

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