Short Story: The Runt

The spring our house flooded and all our possessions were washed away, I had to go and live on my aunt’s farm. My father stayed in the city to work and my mother was preoccupied with the new baby, so I spent all my time alone, or watching my aunt tend to the animals. I wouldn’t speak, just shrug. I didn't laugh either. I felt underwater, like my school books and the piano. You can’t see grief when you are living inside it.

One night, my aunt knocked on the bedroom door and told me to go downstairs to the kitchen. There was a box on the table. I peeked inside and there in the shadows lay a tiny piglet, blinking, wrapped in a piece of towel.

“He needs feeding every two hours until he’s strong enough to make it,” she said, showing me how to drop the milk into his mouth with a pipette. At first the runt turned his snout away from the engulfing drops, closed his eyes and lay his head down, weary already of the world. It seemed nothing could rouse him from his torpor. Scooping him out of the box, I cried in frustration over his limp body, the angry hot tears that scalded my cheeks a silent promise that I wouldn't let him fade away.

In my hands I felt him shift, wheeze and nudge me with a questing nose. Lying him down between my knees, I tried again with the dropper. This time he lapped at the milk greedily. I looked at my aunt and smiled at her so hard.

"We did it!" I said. She smiled back, and there were tears in her eyes too, although I suppose now they weren't for the pig. In the next days and weeks he fed and grew, fierce as a flame. We called him Napoleon; he was a miniature tyrant right from the beginning, stealing crusts from the table and chasing the cats. With me, he played the baby and let me pet him, no matter how big he became. I let him sleep on my bed, despite my Aunt’s doubts and whispered to him in the night as he grunted and flicked his ears.

Pigs grow and carpets dry. By the time my previously underwater home was wrung out and ready and my father came to collect us, my aunt was ready to banish the now enormous Napoleon to his pigsty. So of course, I went back to the city, chattering with pig stories and new laughter, ready to allow my heart to be furnished once again.

Written by Layla Oates

The Runt: A Short Story by Layla Oates. Image Credit: Christopher Carson via Unsplash