Cul-de-sac
I’ve always wondered why some people in this town had the faces of pigs and why some of them did not. It had been this way as long as I could remember, though my father, my friends, my neighbors-–some of them with swine-like features themselves–seemed not to care. When I’d ask them they always brushed it off as if I’d asked, why does an acorn grow into a tree? Or, why do the koi fish swim in circles? It was a natural law, it seemed to me, from their responses (or lack of) — as unexplainable as a great sadness bringing tears to your eyes, or the incomprehensible size of a blue whale. Despite their reactions to my questions, it did not, to me, seem natural. Even more so, I thought, when I learned that people weren’t born with this affliction. Never had it been recorded that a baby came out with the face of a pig. The youngest ever recorded developed their new face at the age of four and half.
The early years of my life I spent obsessed with finding the pattern. I looked at people with the heads of pigs and took scrupulous notes on everything I could find about them–their age, sex, gender, nationality, occupation, lifestyle, time of day and location I saw them.
At first, I thought it was based on occupation. Most every officer I saw at every street corner had on top of their shoulders a pink and bristly face with a long wet snout. Most every person I saw on the news had one. My theory broke down one Sunday morning when I realized that some of the clergy at church were swine, and some were not. The reverend Karl Manichev, had a plump yet human face, while Bishop Gregory had tusks growing twisted and gnarled out from underneath his snout.
Those with pig faces were not always bad, though they ofter weren’t the nicest. Sometimes I’d meet a nice person with a long snout and it throws everything off. None of it made any sense. At the age of fifteen, I began to think it was just another one of life’s great mysteries — the way I suppose all those who outgrow the curiosities of youth inevitably begin to think of life’s unanswerable questions. I stopped asking.
Years ago, when the electrical grid in our town finally went down, everyone walked out their front doors with their arms crossed and each other if their’s was out too. The blackouts and brownouts had been becoming more regular and consistent for several years and everytime the rooms went dark if it would be the last. This time, it was.
In the time since, we’ve changed a lot. Stores stopped accepting inventory, people started fleeing, as they always did, to power zones where there was still some semblance of electricity. The Marsdens, who had the house at the end of the cul-de-sac, moved out the next week, while the rest of us stayed. We stayed because we had no choice, money, family obligation, the lack of cars and gasoline.
At first we stayed, and were unhappy. The world was ending, people said. The world had ended, people said.
But eventually, my neighbors started talking to each other. Why do we stay in all the time? Why do we keep to ourselves? We never share more than a few tomatoes, or a yard tool. The world has not ended yet. Not for us. Let’s take the Marsden’s lot and make it into something.
So each person decided they would be in charge of making, growing, or acquiring something we would need to like. Tom Rodriguez, the aloof bachelor offered to be in charge of meat, The Gilmores would do spring vegetable and fall and winter squash. Maida Jones offered to make clothes for everyone with her industrial sewing machine. Travis Henley still had a car and worked in the city and had a car and a gas connection, he offered to bring us tools and other supplies he could scavenge from other houses of those who’d left. Jaime Entworth was already working on a rainwater capture system for both drinking and irrigation. Others from outside our street offered to make and trade furniture, and help with the gardens, cooking, and scavenging.
It was settled, then. We were officially breaking off.. We would put all of our time, energy, and resources into making our cul-de-sac a thriving, strong, and self-sufficient community. And the best part, to me at least, was that all of my neighbors had clear, beautiful, human faces.
My father offered to do one thing, and to do it very well. Carrots, he said, looking at me with a smile so wide it made wrinkles so large I could see them through his thick beard, me and Peter can grow carrots enough for the entire neighborhood. His pale green eyes twinkled when he said it and I felt, for the first time in a long time, a deep well of joy open up.
For years, it was great. We set up the market in the Marsdens place, in their kitchen, living room, and back yard. It was all free. We made it together, with each other, for each other, so we had no need for currency other than to pay off the cops to look the other when now that we were technically squatting and squatting was illegal.
Money was never even mentioned for those first years, in the Marsden market, until one day.
Father started, first, by asking for donations. I guess he’d grown resentful after years of giving away what he thought of as his product. Having worked most of his life as the owner of a landscaping company, he had always been paid for his work. Of course, most of the people on our street had, and it wasn’t always easy to stay off that hunger they’d been trained to have. But my father was the first person to say — and do — something.
How are we supposed to give away the fruits of our labor, he’d refrained, then, while I still need to pay my bills? So he put a basket out with a note to Tip your Farmers.
I didn’t question it. He was my father after all, and he had a point–we did still have to pay the cop’s bills if we wanted to stay here. Though he (and others in the neighborhood council) made it clear to me that we were in a time of great transition. Currency was to go the way of the Whigs, whatever that had meant.
So what started as an optional tip, turned into a suggested tip, and was soon an all-but-mandatory tip. Soon, he had turned away any customer who could not pay top price for our carrots.
One day, a young woman in our neighborhood named Lyla decided my father was being unfair. Lyla’s parents died in the third plague and she lived with her uncle, down the street in a large corner lot, with her elderly uncle, Russ. She had looked after me when I was too young to be alone. She was a friend of our family’s, as my mother used to introduce her. But that day, in the Marsden’s backyard she was a customer and my father was a carrot salesman. When it was her turn in line, Lyla stared my father down with venomous eyes I’d never seen on her. I set the crate of carrots I had been unloading down, uneasy.
She put her hand on one dirt-speckled bundle and said nothing to my father. Father crossed his arms and humphed. She bolted. Taking with her not one, but three bundles of carrots in her arms. What was she thinking? I first thought. She knows we all know where she lives. No, she wasn’t doing this because she actually needed or wanted the carrots. Not even because she didn’t have the currency, though I am sure she could have found better use for it. She was taunting my father on principle.
I started to chuckle to myself until I saw my father dart after her.
He ran faster than I’d ever seen him move, weaving in and out of people. Thief! he yelled.
Then, to my utter disbelief, he tackled her to the ground, carrots spilling from her arms. Murmurs in the crowd breaking out.
You little thief!! He said as he pinned her down by the wrists. Police! Police! Somebody call the police! The crowd looked at him the way a nurse looks at a Alzheimer’s patient. Of course we agreed that we the cul-de-sac would continue to pay off the police to turn a blind eye and not only refrain from kicking us out, but also staying out of our neighborhood indefinitely (it was better that way, we decided by a community vote of 345 to 7). Lyla squirmed under my father. I saw her legs kicking as I ran up behind him to pull him off. Before I could do anything, his head jerked back. Lyla had socked him good, straight in the nose.
She got up and dusted herself off, cursing him and picking up the broken strewn carrots. I’m so sorry I said to her, but she had had enough.
My father was kneeling with his head bowed. He looked as if he were praying. I saw tiny red droplets fall from his face and then bead in the dry dirt. It was twilight, and the intense light of the sun gasping for breath over the mountains on the horizon made the blood look darker than it was, almost black.
Dad… I — what could I say? Should I say? I suppose I was still in shock, I didn’t think he was capable of something so heinous. Instead of speaking, I put my hand on his back and patted, it felt a tad bit patronizing, but I didn’t know what else to do. He made a sound, almost like a huffing, then he stood up, and turned around.
At first, I thought my eyes were out of focus from the twilit light. My father’s nose was too big, and too flat. His nostrils were nearly as big as he black beady eyes. His ears grew up and out, then flopped down. His cheeks sagged, turgid, as if he held water in them. I felt sick. I cried out something and stumbled away. The crowd that had gathered and was watching the whole thing unfurl started to scream as well. But when I looked around, I realized the person they were startled by was me.
I don’t know why you care so much, Lyla said. We were weeding her garden in her uncle’s backyard. People just look like that sometimes.
Don’t you care? You are the one who stole the carrots.
Yeah, to fuck with him. We have carrots… Greedy pi–
She looked up at me as if to see if I’d caught what she was about to say.
So that’s what you think? It’s cause they’re greedy?
Lyla was silent for a long time. She sat on the edge of a railroad tie that had been set up to make a raised garden bed. She stared at the crabgrass growing up between her bare toes.
I think, she said, it took a lot of people to build what we have here and it only takes one person to fuck it all up.
There was a long silence. Lyla pulled grass up with her toes.
Do you know why? I mean have you ever wondered?
Me? Nah. I’ve wondered, sure, but it is the way it is. Not like knowing why would change that.
Can I tell you what I think? I asked. She nodded.
I think you lose your human face when you lose part of yourself. What my dad did to you was cruel, unnecessary. Against how we’ve agreed to do things here. Why do you think all of the cops have lost theirs? They are literally allowed to act as if they are higher than other humans, treating other people like animals and worse, I’ve never seen a cop with a human face have you?
Get Jake Lyon’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
She shook her head.
But that makes me think — maybe…Maybe he could reclaim it, somehow. Maybe he could–
I’ve heard it happen before… but — she started.
But?
But how? If your theory is right, it would have to be him. He would have to reclaim that part he lost himself.
I went home that night and did not sleep. In the morning I went out to water the garden and saw that it had been torn up. Carrot carcasses laid throughout the carnage that used to be our contribution to our little cul-de-sac community. I desperately picked up bits of carrots I thought I could still salvage, but, being unearthed, most of them were floppy–already baked by the morning sun. I stumbled, sat down and quietly cried.
As I was still softly sobbing, my father walked up behind me. Heard him sniffle through his new snout and between my sobs I managed to whisper. Why? Why would you do this?
We cannot indulge in this if it costs us to do so.
But we don’t need the currency! Soon no one will!
Sweet Peter, you are naive. Things will never change, carrots will always cost you currency to grow, to buy, and to eat. You and your friends will see there is a reason things are the way they are. When you are older you will understand. Yes, when you are older you will understand.
I missed seeing his old face. His light green eyes, his cheeks that had swallowed with his age, his graying temples and receding hairline. I couldn’t believe how ugly he was now, my own father. The father who taught me how to nurture a carrot seed from a tiny speck into a healthy and tasty root. The father who once built the market stalls in the vacant house at the end of our cul-de-sac, because he knew we needed them done before October, and that no one could get them set up nearly as fast as him.
I took one last look at him as he stood over me. Disgust boiled in me and fought with the love I still had for him. His hands were at my eye-level–his calloused and dirty, still-human hands–where I’d expected to find hooves. I began to cry again.
Maybe what Lyla said was right, maybe some people could reclaim their true face, but I was sure my father wasn’t one of them. He had been eaten by greed for years, I realized. But why did he only just lose his face? What had changed? He had tackled Lyla on the ground outside the market. He had called for the police knowing full-well we had none.
Maybe that was it. Maybe he sought to punish and that was the seed for his pig faced blight. But has not every person alive sought to punish, to control, to exert their own will over another’s at some point in their lives? Why then are there still humans left–are we not all pig-faced? Maybe there is a point. A line in the human soul. That, once it gets crossed, the soul corrodes and the pig’s head is just the full-headed wart of presentation of this underlying condition. How then could my father heal his soul?
We like to tell ourselves we’ve moved past all of that. Police are gone and guns have been melted down to make shovels, hoes, computer motherboards, jewelry, etc. Perhaps nature has found a way to turn the residue of our past into a sort of cancer, when it infects us it displays its malignance on our faces for all to see.
And now we’ve grown used to its ugliness, as if the warts and pig snouts were no different from hats and sunglasses–a happenstance. But I know others on our street notice my father, and how he is the only one who looks like that. When he did what he did to Lyla he changed things. Somewhere, a switch flipped. Rexa and Arty Gilmore started staying inside more. I saw less of everyone, and when I did, their eyes lingered on me for too long — or for no time at all.
That is when the hedges started to go up. I don’t know where they got them, if they’d been scavenged, grown from seed, or something else. I just know that one morning I woke up one day and I could no longer see Tom Rodriguez’s front garden plots. I could no longer see Jaime’s Entworth’s water capture system with its tubes and funnels — she’d believed that everything useful should be beautiful, and was trying to twist them into a cohesive fountain sculpture. I could no longer see Lyla and Russ’s house. Even the Marsden’s house was now out of sight.
Tears formed but didn’t fall. I walked outside and went down the street toward where it opens to the rest of the neighborhood. I swore I saw the Gilmores in their house, arm in arm, staring me down. It was time to face what was happening. I thought of what Lyla said, how it only takes one person to poison a whole community.
Back in our house my father was watching TV in our living room. He had set up a small, single solar panel hooked directly into the television set. He was watching some game show with three pig headed people and one human.
Dad, I said, still standing in the corner of the room, slightly behind his chair, I need to talk to you.
But I couldn’t think of what to say or how to say. Have you seen the hedges out there? Is what came out. He looked at me and grunted back to the TV.
Listen, I need to talk to you, I said again, I think I can help you, but I need you to be with me on this. I th–
My father turned swiftly in his chair and squealed, ears flopping: Help me? Help me? Help me?
Why would I need your help? I don’t need a boy who is friends with thieves. You can leave for all I care.
He had never spoken to me like that before. It hit me like a gust of wind and I struggled to breath through the hurt and rage.
Peter, I’m sorry, he said sitting back down, I didn’t mean that son, you know me, I have a temper sometimes. Maybe…maybe I did overreact…with Lyla.
Then his voice hardened again. But, he said, a son does not tell his father what to do. That girl broke the l — did something wrong, son. I did what anyone would have. It’s only fair. And I’ll make sure her and that lazy uncle of hers pay. Otherwise what are people going to think? That they can walk all over us?
I didn’t say that it’s not what other people would have done. I did not remind him that we agreed on currency free exchange. That when Rexa Gilmore got sick and had to eat more than her share no one said a word. I didn’t tell him that the world we live in now is different. That in some ways it’s better than the one he grew up in and in other ways it’s just liminal. That this is just one growing pain. But, as he said, a son does not tell his father what to do, and old habits die hard.
Instead I said, Dad… Your face… I think–well I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I, well, don’t you want your old one back? He looked at me with his beady black eyes and I had never felt like I was looking at something so wholly animal, so resolutely not human, let alone, father to anything.
Outside, a siren blared, short and loud, like a gunshot. A voice said something over a bullhorn. The drapes of our house were aglow with red and blue light. Back in the living room, my father’s chair was empty.
The sun had set and the sky glowed with the last efforts of the sun. The lights from six police cruisers danced around the cul-de-sac. Tom Rodruigez, Jamie Entworth, Travis Henley, and Maida Jones, Lyla and even Uncle Russ all came out of their houses, down their walks to the street. Even Tom looked surprised, even scared.
What the fuck is going on? Travis said, we paid. We’ve never missed a payment, the deal was —
We know what the deal was, one of the cops said. He had small tusks protruding from his mouth. But we’ve received a call from someone for detainment and removal of a thief from the neighborhood. You hippies may incentivize us to leave you alone, but the law still exists, and we’re here to enforce that law. I am Officer Clark, and we don’t want any trouble. Who made the call?
He reached behind his back and pulled out handcuffs.
I did, the voice was my father’s. He emerged from behind one of the cruisers with another swinehead cop. My father pointed to Lyla. The cops moved toward her, leaving several officers with their guns on the rest of us.
Wait, I said, wait wait wait! I ran after the cops. I put my hand on the shoulder of one of the officers who was headed toward Lyla and he turned around, bringing his fist into my cheek. I tasted copper. Now full of rage and adrenaline, I jumped on the back of the officer. I was like an animal. I grabbed his piggy ears and pulled and punched face from both sides. He squirmed and twirled trying to fling me off of his back. I did not heat the gasps of my neighbors, I did not hear the other officers turn their guns on us. I did not hear them going back and forth, deciding whether or not to take the shot. But I did hear the shot when it rang out.
I had not seen a police officer in real life in many years. It was easy to forget, even under their gear, the uniform, the gun, and the pig face, they were human, like us. They eat and drink like us. They can die like us.
Officer down! Officer down! Get that fucking kid! I was on the asphalt and bleeding more. More shots rang out, ricocheting off concrete. Someone was yanking me up by my arm and I flailed, trying to land a punch.
Stop! Stop! It’s me! It was Lyla.
Then we ran. We weaved in and out of yards. I held my arm, which was bleeding and probably broken. We came to the steps of the Marsden’s and I stopped. I saw several officers crowding around the shot one. I saw Rexa Gilmore sobbing and Arty consoling her. I saw Tom run back into his house to grab something. I saw Jamie Entworth helping Russ back to his house. And I saw my father wrestling an officer to the ground and punching him.
Maybe it was me hoping, being stupid, naive. I had lost a lot of blood and suffered a blow to the head. But as Lyla yanked me back and we ran through the Marsden’s house, through the yard, and over the backyard fence, I kept replaying the image of my father I’d seen in that last glimpse of him on top of that officer, silhouetted by police lights. His eyes had met mine. Were they black and beaty? Or green and pale? Were his pig ears smaller? Or even there at all?
Lyla pulled me with her around a street corner and we disappeared into the night.
