On a night where the moon silvers the falling snow and the air is the gaping mouth of a frozen corpse, the skeleton pig lowers its head to the river flowing upstream and drinks while dreaming of spring. Trees like pale fingers strain towards the skies and line both sides of the river—the skeleton pig has never strayed into the woods for fear of losing its way, but it is tempted to venture beyond this eternal walk along the frigid water. It remembers little other than this journey, this cold.
A branch snaps, and it straightens, bone ears flickering like a rabbit’s when another rabbit is being skinned. But only a dead butcher emerges from the fossil-trees, a dark hole colouring his fading midsection. They face each other at a standstill, as if they are staring into a distorted mirror and haunted by their reflections.
What are you? he whispers.
The skeleton pig does not hear him because it is shivering and wondering if he had fallen on his knife.
Cold.
He frowns. I suppose it is.
Heat.
He opens his mouth, closes it. It’s too wet for a fire.
The skeleton pig nods like it knows this already.
The dead butcher glances towards where the river meets the horizon. Is that where we’re headed?
We. The skeleton pig has never considered this—that they’d end up in the same afterlife. It can’t make sense of it now. But when has anything made sense?
After a pause, it nods.
Would you like company as you walk?
Bewildered, it doesn’t know how to respond, and the dead butcher seems to take that as affirmation.
Come, let’s get you warmed up first.
It hesitates while the dead butcher waits. But skeleton pig is cold, so it goes towards him until they’re walking side by side, until it isn’t clear who’s leading the way. In the woods that bleed into the living, forgotten voices murmur and whisper of buried secrets and dead dreams, and it isn’t long before the pair arrive before the butchery.
• • • •
It is colder inside the butchery, where pieces of meat and complete pig skins hang from hooks like sacrifices atoning for an unspoken crime—a twisted puzzle that the skeleton pig will never solve. The dead butcher’s house is right behind. The skeleton pig sees the fireplace through the windows and the silhouettes of people huddled around it—the butcher’s son, perhaps, and his children. At the opposite door, the dead butcher finally notices the skeleton pig, rooted at the entrance.
As the skeleton pig treads through the rows and rows of stock, the dead butcher finally registers what it is, and even though he wishes he could look anywhere else, he watches.
The skeleton pig halts in the middle of it all, unhooks a skin-body, jaws clamping on the neck gingerly, and sets it down on the floor stained with generations of blood. When it noses the skin open and slips in, it is warmer, like coming home.
When it departs, the dead butcher does not follow. It suspects he might never be able to leave.
Outside, the snow has stopped. Sunrise thaws icicles lining roofs, withered grass, and lesser streams. Moss and blossoms bloom where flesh should be, and vines are weaving together skin and bone. The pig returns for the river to the heavens, the butcher’s son none the wiser.