Rachel awoke, full of purpose. Today was the day she was going to stop eating human. For years now, she’d empathized with the creatures she studied in her lab; their scared, searching eyes, their hairless skin that almost resembled her own, the bleating, pleading noises that came from their mouths. But to have love for a creature that had desecrated her kind for so long…she never thought it would be possible. Not until Subject 42.
She rolled from her pen, and began her daily process of getting ready. At the sink, she brushed her tusks and lapped mouthwash from the little trough on the vanity. When she clopped into the kitchen, her fridge yawned open, full from her last stop at the butcher. Thighs, arms, even pickled feet adorned the shelves. Rachel ordered her house-bot to throw it all in the incinerator. Instead of her usual breakfast of crisped people belly and slop, she ate oats, barley, and fresh kale.
When she left her home, she felt light, righteous, and a little hungry.
She clip-clopped into her lab, light on her hooves for the first time in weeks. The sun seemed to shine a bit brighter on the sterile instruments around her. As usual, she was the first to arrive. She headed straight to Subject 42’s enclosure. She’d had the room painted to look like it had walls of cement, like the buildings her kind had found the humans squatting in after the Four Foot Rebellion. The humans were pacified by the lack of color and the right angles. Rachel found it all very dour, but the creatures seemed to enjoy being surrounded by their own creations.
She was about to rap against the glass with a hoof, when she noticed that the enrichment activity she’d given to Subject 42 yesterday sat untouched on the table in her enclosure. Rachel cocked her head. Humans loved to tinker, yet the disassembled mass spectrometer from her lab was still a pile of gleaming parts. The human hadn’t even picked up the screwdriver. How odd.
Peter snorted next to her. She felt the thick hair on her spine bristle. The boar had begun wearing hoof-slippers, and she could never hear him when he approached. They were totally absurd, but that was the way of fashion these days. “I told you it couldn’t rebuild it. 42 is a runt. It even forgets to eat.”
Rachel couldn’t stand the boar. He was just like all the other boars she went to university with. All bravado, no substance. “She is very competent. There is just something missing from her environment. I’m surprised injecting her with the female hormones didn’t change her behavior.” Rachel felt a twinge of empathy for the hairless ape.
Peter scratched his covered hoof with his tusk. “I do not know why you sows insist on hogmanizing these creatures. They’re people, nothing more. Next thing you’ll start telling me they experience emotion.”
“They do!” Rachel chuffed. She’d wanted to gore this nepo pig since their first week working together.
“They used to kill each other’s children! With bombs, from the sky! Do you not remember what they did to our kin? They barbecued us! They’ll never rise above their base humanity. This whole project is doomed. There’s nothing left to learn from them. Hopefully my father understands that. The most pigmane thing we can do is sterilize them.”
“Why even come to work if you’re just going to trot all over what we do here?”
“Because my father…”
“Because my father,” Rachel mocked. “Go chase your tail, Peter. Some of us have actual science to do.”
Peter brayed and left noiselessly in his stupid hoof-slippers. What a person.
Rachel knocked quietly on 42’s enclosure. The woman turned her small, hard eyes on Rachel. She pushed a piece of oat-cracker through the partition. The human stood and walked swiftly across the room. Their bipedal movements always gave Rachel the creeps. It was unnatural. One must have their body connected to the ground by all appendages. This was part of Rachel’s Unified Theory of Human Abnormality. She was convinced that it all tied back to their heads being too far from the ground. It detached them from their nature.
42 picked up the oat-bread with her spidery fingers. She looked at it, sniffed the bread, then threw it on the ground. The oat-bread shattered. 42 stared down at Rachel, her eyes hog-like. They had the rage her father’s used to hold when he talked about the Rebellion. 42 spoke in the human’s strange tongue. Rachel barely had time to start her recorder. The sound was guttural and clipped. Then she spit on the glass that separated them. 42 walked back to her corner and pulled herself into a ball against the mural of the cement wall.
Rachel wished she could understand the words the human said without the help of her translator. She wondered if spitting was seen as a sign of respect in their race. Context clues pointed to no.
She took one last look at the human. Her ribs poked through her thin, white skin. She looked nothing like the overfed humans of the meat farms. Rachel knew 42 would die here like
their other subjects. She just wished she could understand why they kept letting themselves starve. What creature would ignore food when they were hungry?
Back at her pen, Rachel plugged her recording into the translator bot. The machine collated the data and snorted out the sounds of her own language. 42 had said, “I miss bacon.”
What’s bacon?
Joe Pandolfi (he/him) considers writing both his purpose and passion. When he’s procrastinating writing, you can find him owl-spotting in Northwest forests, watching movies with his partner, and entertaining his cats, Thelma and Louise.
Joe’s short “Dirtworld” was featured in Issue 10 Harmattan Season: Well Runs Dry.