by Elizaveta A
The name is M. Now, most people would pronounce it as [É™m] but I always meant for it to be more like long «mmm» – the sound both used for pleasure and pain. Mr Hogpig doesn’t think much of it. He was not convinced with it to begin with – what kind of name is it, it is only one letter he would say and when I explained to him the sound thing, he got even more upset. Mr Hogpig, you see, is not a friend of linguistics. All science makes him sad.Â
The hair is long or rather used to be long. I lost a lot of them after the last PEIIm vaccination and even though it still didn’t take (thanks to Gabriel and whatever he induced my poor body with), it certainly had some physical effects on me. Not that hair matters much.Â
The body is long. I can roam in the clouds while Mr Hogpig is reduced to earth – or I can hand him over objects from upper shelves to make our breakfast for poor people. I guess we are both not quite used to being poor and as of now we rather see it as a peculiar status. You see, poor people rarely call themselves poor, but we thrive on this word. It didn’t quite hit us yet. We could use skipping meals – lots of food make us irritable and slow. I remember whaling around my mother’s house after family dinners, eyes empty and cloudy, endless evenings stretching before me. A perfect citizen of Pig Empire, if you ask me, even back then, even without the vaccination.Â
I often dream of that house but it always takes some different shape, merges into a forest or a sea, grows mushrooms on its walls or stretches exotic plants I’ve only seen on books’ pages out of its roof. If in my dreams I get to enter (that does not happen often because even in my imagination the door mostly remains closed), but if I do enter I find no human inhabitants. The rooms are full of prehistoric creatures occupying my mother’s beloved sofas with hand-sewn flower print. There is no point in talking in these kinds of dreams but if I try the language unknown to me pours out of my mouth. That is how far away I’ve wondered from home.Â
The eyes are prolonged to the temples and not that I am showing off, but I used to be beautiful – shame that back in the day my beauty was hidden under all these layers of ridiculous good girl dresses and so much hair and meals. To say that we ate traditionally at my mother’s house would be a lie – we ate ritually. And while my whole family remained aristocratically skinny, these old money hollow look only the rich could master, only after a meal of thousand courses topped with cakes (these I do not touch ever after Gabriel’s tea party), I enlarged as if aiming to fill all the empty rooms of our lonely house. Now it is all gone of course – a year of intense love, torture and endless moving would do that to you topped with almost six months of longing and working for the first time in my life. But somehow I have not become beautiful when shed all the layers. When I shed the layers it appeared that I was not anything to begin with.Â
© Elizaveta A 2024-08-30