The Awareness

by Gene Stone

  She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She thought of the sun. Then she stopped herself. What was the sun? She felt close to remembering it, the sun, but no image entered her mind, no matter how hard she tried to conjure one. Maybe the sun was a myth, and not worth this effort.

  And then she thought of one word: “Human.” But the word wafted away like a secret....

  “Focus,” she told herself. “Focus on what’s here. Hoof.”

  Her hoof. She lifted it. It was harder than the rest of her. It seemed to be made of ivory bone; she licked it. It held the taste of salt. In the middle, it was cracked, like the pen itself. She noticed the symmetry of things. The fact that it was split evenly pleased her. Above the hoof was her leg, short and strong and dotted with coarse hairs and stains from something she didn’t recognize. Above the leg was her body. She could feel the weight of it; it was heavy. It seemed too heavy.

  “Pig,” she said.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” asked a pig next to her.

  “It feels good to say it,” she responded, trying not to stare at the other pig’s large, dark eyes.

  “Pig. Pig. Pig,” the new pig said, then fell silent. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  “See?” the first pig asked.

  The new pig shook her head.

  “Maybe you’re not saying it right.” She looked the new pig up and down. She noticed something sticking out of her left ear. A tag. With a number on it. She inched her face closer.

  “What are you doing?” the new pig asked.

  “You’re number 789.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. That’s what it says. On your ear.”

  “Pig 789. I like how that sounds.”

  Pig 789 then looked at the ear of her new friend.

  “323.”

  323? Yes, she thought, good. The digits belonged to her, like her hoof, like her stout legs. Amid the pen of replicas, she owned something unique.

  “Pig,” she said again. But this time the word came out like lava, slow and powerful and hot.

  “We need to eat,” Pig 789 said.

  323 nodded. They both watched the large feeding troughs, which were empty. At some point, food would pour through holes high on the wall. Grains and oats and whatever else. Both pigs, riddled by intense hunger, looked up at the holes in the wall and tried to will food to come pouring out. But nothing happened.

  The mass of pigs began to crowd around the troughs, pushing and prodding, anticipating the food, anticipating the holes opening and the subsequent scent of barley and oats, rich and buttery, filling the pen. 323’s stomach growled. She pushed with the mass of pigs towards the troughs that lined the back wall. She walked over the grated floor, forgetting her earlier fear of it, forgetting the fact that she was now aware, that things had changed, and also that something was wrong, that the food should be barreling down from its source, its unknown source. It wasn’t.

  The pigs resorted to their old noises now. The food had always come. It had slid down the feeder shafts at the same time every day. They knew this without knowing they knew it, just as they knew to cram together when the storms attacked the roof of the pen, just as they knew when to relieve themselves or how to chew.

  “Something isn’t right,” 323 said quietly to 789. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “What do you mean?” 789 asked. “What’s a bad feeling?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t feel good. I don’t feel like myself. I keep seeing these strange things, images. I don’t know from where. But my skin hurts. It feels like it’s on fire.”

  “What’s fire?”

  “Something that will kill us. All of us.” Knowledge, words, thoughts, images filled 323’s mind.

  But 789 had quit listening to 323’s ranting. She was hungry and that was all that concerned her.

  323 began breathing heavily. The harsh lights that hung from the ceiling began to blink. Or was that just 323’s eyelids? She wanted to be alone. She wanted all the other pigs to leave. She wanted to leave. She could feel the waste on the floor. She could smell its pungent acidity. The smell made her nauseated. The lights flickered more. The pigs, all of them, became, once again, one large entity, a fat pink balloon, a distorted dream. She licked her hoof again, hoping for the same salty satisfaction, but she could only taste the waste and the grime. She knew that those stains on her flesh were markings of something very bad. She noticed that the other pigs had the same stains. And all the stains were the same. They seemed to indicate something, but she didn’t know what.

  “We have to leave,” she whispered to 789. But her voice was hardly audible, all breath and no tone. “We need to leave.”

  But 789 wasn’t listening. She was walking toward the other end of the trough, in search of food or different company.

  “We need to leave,” 323 said again, but no one heard; the fervor for sustenance was too loud, the echoes of the pigs ricocheting over the pen like babbling arrows.

  Her legs began to shake. The light narrowed. The smells and sounds, all of them, the new and the familiar, faded into one small dot, just a few feet before her eyes. She tried to walk toward the dot. Every time she neared it, it moved. Her breathing was now raspy and asthmatic. Her hoof began to slip, and this time, she couldn’t stop herself. This time, she fell.

  She had no idea how much time had passed when she came to. She remembered falling. And then darkness. Now, the false light of the pen blinded her. When her eyes focused, she could see the other pigs staring down. They whispered in each other’s ears. They wondered if she was alive, if she was hurt, if she was insane. Through the murmuring, she looked for 789. She tried to remember if there had been anything to distinguish 789 from the others, but what she remembered most was the small tag pinned to the pig’s left ear.

  323 rose to her feet. The other pigs backed away. 323 felt as though she was waking up from a dream for the second time. But this time she felt more confident about her awareness. She felt she understood it better.

  “We need to eat,” 323 said.

  The pigs agreed. The feeding troughs were still empty; nothing had come down the chute during her interval in the darkness.

  323’s mind was racing. She was scanning the pen for clues to a mystery she didn’t quite know she needed to solve. She saw it as she had seen it earlier: A square pen, cut in the middle with a pathway, lined with metal fences on either side that kept the pigs in either section locked in. There were no windows except the one atop the front door. Feeding troughs lined the back walls beneath chutes that were supposed to pour grains.

  Disappointment filled 323. These four walls were her life. This was all she had to show for her time alive. A small spark of anger began to form somewhere in her empty belly.

  “We need to eat,” she said. The words came out of her with a passion she didn’t recognize or understand. Any murmuring that was still trickling among the other pigs stopped.

  “We need to eat, which means we need to leave the pen.”

  The pigs flared in vocal uprising.

  “Leave the pen?” they asked.

  “What do you mean?” they asked.

  “How will we eat? How will we feed?” they asked.

  “This is our home,” they said.

  She understood how they felt. She yearned to feel like them. But she didn’t.

  “We won’t get fed. We can stay here forever but the food will no longer come.”

  Some of the pigs shouted at her, screamed newly acquired and understood epithets, called her names.

  “Yell at me all you want, but the truth is in the empty troughs. The humans have left.”

  “Humans?” A pig asked, her voice separating itself from the verbal din of the others. She stepped forward. 323 recognized 789.

  “789. Yes. Humans.”

  “When have you seen a human?”

  323 felt her cheeks flush. She tried to straighten her legs. She tried to come up with an answer.

  “I ca
n’t recall. But I know they did this.”

  323 indicated the pen, the metal fence, the locked-down reality of the pigs’ existence.

  “Don’t think about humans. Think about food. We don’t know much about humans. We know what food is. Think about food.” 789 spoke calmly. Her words didn’t have the passion, the anger that infused 323’s speech.

  “Then why is there no food?” said another pig. “We’ve always had food. The day we become aware happens to be the day that the food stops?”

  “Aware?” “What we now are.”

  The pigs understood. But there were more pressing issues.

  “Perhaps the humans have fled.”

  “Why would they flee?” 323 responded. “What have they done?”

  But here 323 stopped. What was she arguing for? Or against? She wasn’t sure of anything. But she knew she was right. She knew things that she felt she shouldn’t know. She also knew there was a time and place to fight for the truth, and this wasn’t that time or that place. She knew that somehow, for some reason, her voice was the one that the other pigs had to hear. The other pigs felt the awareness, but some were more aware than others. She looked around at the other pigs, seeking those whose eyes spoke a commonality.

  “Let’s try to get out,” 323 said, “so we can find the food source. Maybe it’s broken. We all know the food comes from those chutes near the top of the walls. Perhaps the food is just over those walls.”

  The other pigs strained to see through the walls. The ones nearest the back wall reared up on their hind legs and tried to push the silver wall down. It didn’t fall.

  “I think you and I should find a way outside and inspect the situation,” 323 said to 789.

  “Why should we? Why should we leave the pen?”

  “Because we need to eat,” 323 said again, but it wasn’t what she wanted to say. She wanted to say because we belong out there, we belong in the soggy summer fields and marshes, in the meadows with the summer zephyrs, in the orange autumn, rummaging through a cornfield, staring up at a sickle moon. Images kept pouring into her mind, as they must have been pouring into the others’ minds, but her mind was stronger, it was sorting things out, it was leading the others. Perhaps awareness was being doled out differently, she thought, unlike the food, which came equally and joyfully to all.

  The food...

  The pigs were hungry. The food wasn’t coming. They argued over how to get out, how to release themselves from the locked pen. From either side of the aisle, the pigs bantered back and forth. Food had to be found. They had to act.

  “We need to climb on top of each other,” one pig said.

  This seemed feasible when spoken. But it proved a difficult, painful task to accomplish.

  “Maybe one of the smaller pigs can squeeze through the open spaces of the gate,” another pig offered.

  But none of the pigs fit that description.

  Still others pleaded, “Wait.” The chutes would open. Some lied and said that they remembered times past when this exact thing had occurred, when the chutes offered no food for a time, and then, like magic, the food had come, sweet and robust and plentiful.

  And some of the pigs didn’t participate in the exchange at all. They stood still, agitated, too confused to take sides. Food, they thought.

  While all of this was happening, 323 was watching. First the grated floor, then her body, then the pen, and now she saw the fence. The slats of which ran horizontally to the ground, a new slat every six inches, and were anchored by seven metal poles jutting up from the ground, silver but stained copper with rust, each pole six inches higher than the one below it. Every ten feet or so a vertical pole anchored the horizontal poles.

  This is a prison, she thought. And she knew what a prison was. A small, confined place to hold criminals. Was that what they were—criminals? We are pigs, she thought.

  She had to know why they were all locked away, what sin they had committed. Part of her was frightened. What kind of monster had she been before the awareness? She lamented the unknown wreckage of her past for one, sad moment.

  Then she saw something that forced her out of her mind.

  At the end of the fence, near the front door that opened to the outside, and on the other side of the pen, was a gate.

  It’s a doorway, she thought. Where the humans can enter. That word again, “humans.” The word tasted of salt like her hoof, it tasted of bitterness and of something else, too, which, despite all her new words, she couldn’t recognize.

  I’m too hungry, she thought.

  She worked her way through the arguing pigs, through the silent ones, the lying ones, the nervous and anxious ones.

  She reached the gate. She studied it. It had hinges. She could sense what these hinges were for. They enabled the gate to be swung open, but only far enough to let something in or out. She saw the latch. The puzzle was beginning to make sense. Unhook the latch. Use the hinges to swing the gate open, then leave the pen.

  She walked up to the gate. She sniffed around it. She could smell her brethren on everything, a sharp odor of brine and grease. She gently nudged the gate. It creaked. It moved an inch or two. Then it stopped.

  The latch was stopping it.

  “What are you doing?” a pig with raccoon circles under her eyes asked her.

  “We need to open the gate,” she said.

  She felt, somehow, that the words meant more than they seemed to. She knew if she could think about just that she would understand their significance. But there wasn’t time.

  “Help me,” she said to the pig next to her. The pig looked at 323 with incredulity.

  “Help you?”

  “Yes.”

  323 walked back a few paces. She made eye contact with the pig.

  “Don’t stare at me,” the new pig said. Both pigs averted their eyes from the other.

  She then looked behind the pig’s eyes, to her ear, and peered at the small placard.

  “I need your help, 602. We have to get the gate open. I can’t do it without your help.”

  323 then saw something, a spark in the new pig’s eyes. Something switched on inside 602’s mind. She understood. She understood that 323 needed her, and why. The two sows nodded in unison, and then they both ran full-force into the iron fence.

  And they both winced in pain when the iron fence pushed back.

  The racket at the fence caught the attention of the other pigs.

  “What are you two doing?”

  “We’re helping each other open the gate.”

  The pigs stood silent as the words rang in their ears. Then, as it had come to 602, came understanding.

  “If we all charge at the same time, our weight should bear down on the gate,” said 156.

  “No. It won’t. The gate is too strong. We need to remove the latch,” said 743. “The latch is the key.”

  They all thought about this, and 323 felt a warmness enter her body, a feeling of comfort and camaraderie, of spirits bonded by a common goal. Open the gate, and open everything else, and open the truth to what the awareness might mean.

  And then a human entered her mind. Perfectly formed. Tall, lean, with a yellowy hide. The warmness left her.

  “They’re going to kill us,” she said calmly.

  602 heard her.

  “What?”

  “The humans are going to kill us.”

  “There are no humans here.”

  “There are. They made this. They put us here. This is why we gained awareness. To get out of here. We have to do it now. We have to. Otherwise they will come here and find us and we will perish.”

  The other pigs heard the panic in her voice.

  “She just speaks and speaks,” said a pig from the back. It was 789. “She’s been trying to scare me, us, all afternoon. Ignore her. She talks about things that don’t exist. Ignore her. She’s not well. The food will come. It’s late. This has happened before.”

  “No,” said 323. “The food is not coming. We will only eat if we
get out of here.”

  “But we never leave here,” said 789.

  “We’ve never talked to each other before,” said 323.

  The other pigs thought this over. Some took 323’s side. Some agreed with 789.

  The pigs looked at each other, blankly. Moments passed. Then 323 let her mind lead her down a new path. “Fine,” she said. “Those who want to stay here with 789 can do so. Those who want to break down the door with me can do so.”

  The pigs murmured among themselves. They had never before moved in different directions. They always did the same thing at the same time.

  “Fine,” said 119. “I will join 323.”

  “I will join 789,” said two other pigs.

  Soon the pigs had divided into sides. They looked at each other suspiciously, asked each other, do you follow 323? Do you follow 789?

  The followers of 789 backed away. 323 waited anxiously for them to object to the escape plan, to argue that if they opened the latch, the food might not come for any of them. But 789’s mind did not make the same leaps as 323’s.

  323 spoke. “Let’s knock down the fence.”

  Half of the pig population now attempted to destroy the latch. They tried to tear it off with their teeth, they tried to butt it off with their heads, but the metal proved resilient. The hunger was becoming pandemic, too much to bear.

  Finally, they agreed to charge. They made as straight a line as possible and charged, tons of pig weight pushing against the unwavering metal of the fence. Their first attempt proved futile.

  789 and her followers watched. Their hunger was making them uneasy. A few of them broke to help the charge.

  The pigs tried again. This attempt also failed.

  On their third attempt, the pigs dug in. Pig upon pig pushed and pushed. The fence began to shake.

  “Push!”

  “Push!”

  “Push!”

  The fence fell. The clanging of the fallen poles reverberated off the silver walls. Many of the pigs on the other side of the pen followed their lead, and soon, that fence, too, fell to the ground. The pigs were free.