SSCS 02: Installment 22 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 22 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“Then you just need to mend something. The actual thing that’s broken. Let’s go figure out how to fix that stupid latch on that stupid pig gate. For good this time.” And when Mina stood and hauled Hedwin to his feet, he didn’t resist this direction, just hoovered, somewhat dejectedly, a couple inches off the ground as he followed her down to the pig pens.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 22: 21.0123
***
“Oh Primsickle!” Mina snarled while wrapping a length of wire tightly around the base of the latch tongue on her half of the pig gate. “You know she did this because she knew we were going to eat her next and now look where that got her!” Mina had to stand on the pig side while she worked, because they couldn’t mend the gate properly with it closed, and Bunsnort had wandered over to see what they were doing and would have been out again in a trice if Mina didn’t keep bumping him back with her legs. He wasn’t yet one of the big ones, thank the slimy muck for that. Though, on the other hand, it looked like the biggest of all, Teapot, had been the other one got by the kraken, which was certainly no good either.
“Mina, you know Primsickle didn’t have two bits of wit to rub together.” Hedwin had pulled apart the latch plate and now was fitting it onto a new board. With one skinny arm, he reached over to where Mina was and patted her hand, chafing the knuckles a bit before getting back to work. “It seemed like she died really fast, at least.”
Mina just pressed her lips together, tight, and kept wrapping. Hedwin was trying to be nice right now, because Mina had a bad habit of crying during slaughtering time. But it wasn’t nice at all of him to be pre-emptive about it. And it wasn’t as though that had ever stopped Mina from enjoying bacon best of all the dinner foods. Really, it was just that her face was leaky sometimes, just like with the stupid-smelling oyster bells. The wire pinched her fingers to wrap it, but Mina didn’t stop until she’d used up the full length that Hedwin had given her. “Is this really going to work properly?” Mina asked at last, tucking in the final end of wire using the tip of one of the nails Hedwin had lying about.
“It’s really going to work.” Hedwin reached for the hammer and started tapping on a large nail he’d set into the plate. Before it was properly driven in, though, he paused a moment, letting out a breath that sounded tired and rested at the same time. “Thank you, Mina.” Mina was pretty sure he could have stopped now without actually fixing the gate and been fine. His shoulders weren’t wound up to his ears anymore. He’d got himself out of the loop.
After a long time of working in silence, Hedwin spoke up again. “Mina?” He kept his eyes focused on his task. “How many times has that happened to you?”
Mina was now lounging with her back against the gate, keeping it pressed in place while Hedwin finished his side, so it was easy to keep her face turned away from him to answer. “A few,” she said, before focusing on giving Bunsnort, now lying beside her, a good forehead scratch.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Mina swallowed. There really wasn’t anything worth looking at staring into the pig pen, but she really, really didn’t want to turn around and look at Hedwin either. “I was too scared the first time.” She swallowed again. “I thought I must have done something really, really wrong for gran-Tom to do that to me. And then after that…” Mina realized she didn’t hear tool noises anymore and so finally did cast a glare over her shoulder. When the tool noises started back up, she turned resolutely back to Bunsnort. “It’s not gran-Tom, though. It’s something else. I kind of don’t think gran-Tom even knows about it.”
Hedwin didn’t say anything else after that.
Later, when Mina was headed back to the kitchen to try to figure out what to do about (human) food, she was stopped by the sight of gran-Tom standing by the kitchen doorway, her heavy figure somehow looking both stooped and tightly contained.
“Have you put the spire to rights, Mina?” The voice was low and scratchy, but the priestess’ own, and Mina, feeling suddenly drained, answered without thought.
“I’m not sure how, gran-Tom.”