How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters

Well, here it is, installments 1 and 2 are now live of my next SSCS! (That stands for Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Story, which is something you can find out more about here.) I’ll be putting out a new (pretty short) installment once each week, on Friday, until the story is done (around about early August).

This year’s story, ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters,’ has a very different flavor than last year’s. Some points of note include:

a) The SSCSs continue to be pretty experimental, which means that the level of polish on the prose (ahem) varies. (Also, I had no clue what my setting was when I started, and a couple early installments that have two different draft dates listed reflect my going back later to make said setting legible.)

b) This story comes with a content warning: Magical Compulsion

As always, if you find this year’s story isn’t for you, then please do feel free to skip. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my silliness.

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…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters

Installment 1: 18.0510

The pigs had got into the flying fruit again, and now there was shit everywhere.

Installment 2: 18.0622, 22.0406

And really, ‘everywhere’ was an understatement.  Mina prudently kept her mouth tight shut as she looked up and around her, surveying the damage. 

For half-an-instant she wished she knew of a way to make a great, big gale stir up out of nowhere and just blow the whole mess off into the sea.  But any such gale would almost certainly make off with most of the garden, possibly the kitchen roof, and half of everything else up here on the top level of the spire.  The under-rooms would probably be safe, but the pig fences wouldn’t be, and without pig fences the horror that Mina now beheld would just repeat itself, on loop.

There was pig shit clumped along the fence rails, and spattered in zig-zags over the garden path and cabbage rows.  There was a nasty sploosh on the lintel over the kitchen door and new shadows among the branches of the spire’s few apple trees that suggested Mina would want to be careful to stay away when a gust did pick itself up.  There was even a long, stringy doodle of shit that had managed to drape itself, this way and that, all the way up to the top of the climbing rose that went from the back gate to more than halfway up the observatory tower.

That last would be Primsickle’s doing; the fattest, greediest pig on the spire adored rose petals.

Which was why they hadn’t had any blooms within hands reach of the ground since the last of the winter sea frost had melted off the back pig-gate toward the end of spring, and the reason gran-Tom insisted Mina put on her gloves first thing when she woke up in the morning: They couldn’t have holy tea without new-rose tincture, and there was no rose-tincture to be got without a strong climb up a thorny bramble.

Mina didn’t ever see how the holy tea was really worth it.  The only gloves she had were too big, were made out of steel-pig hide, and itched.  Though, now that she saw the breath-taking extent of where the pigs had got to, she thought maybe she should have just been sneaking flying fruit herself this whole time. At least now there wouldn’t be any rose blossoms for gran-Tom to send her after for at least a week, maybe two.  As Mina took in the wide destruction of her morning chore schedule, that was some consolation.

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