An Idiomatic Study of Swine
Maddox Emory Arnold
No one saw it coming. Well, no one except Maggie. At the wise age of nine, she knew better than all of us.
It happened on a field trip to the zoo. I had just gotten the class lined up to leave the farm exhibit when three pigs wandered over to the edge of their enclosure. My students oohed and aahed at their curly tails and floppy ears. All except Maggie. She stood at the front of the line, quiet and solemn.
“You don’t like the pigs, Maggie?” I asked.
She turned to me, eyes bright. “Why don’t they fly?” she said.
I blinked, taken aback. “They can’t. Remember what we talked about in class? Only animals with wings can fly.”
Maggie balled her hands into fists. “Pigs too,” she insisted. “They can fly. Look at them.”
I did, and so did some of her classmates. They giggled at the idea of the pigs dodging and weaving in the sky. Even I had to suppress a laugh, already planning to review the animal unit in a bit more detail when we returned from the field trip.
The pigs, however, must have known their secret was out. They paused, and I could have sworn they stared directly at Maggie, who smiled shyly at them. The pigs turned and, as one, began to run toward the other side of their enclosure. I worried they’d barrel right through the fence, but at the last second, they leaped into the air.
And began to float.
I stared, open-mouthed, at the three pigs twirling overhead. They soared in a grand arc to hover directly above the gathering crowd of onlookers. I could just barely make out the thin, translucent wings sprouting from their backs.
Wings. Had pigs always had wings?
Maggie pointed at them, grinning. “See? I told you they could do it.”
We soon found out that it wasn’t just the pigs at the zoo. Maggie’s discovery had awakened every pig on the planet, nearly 800 million of them. They broke out of their pens, stormed slaughterhouses to free their kind. They filled the skies like great pink birds, flying in tight formations that cast reddish shadows across the ground wherever they passed.
It went on like this for weeks—more and more pigs taking flight while humankind scrambled to adapt. Ecologists fussed over the effect this would have on the food chain. Physicists fretted over the mechanics of flight. Farmers tore their hair worrying about profits and food production, not to mention the ethics of having held these creatures captive for so long.
But the philosophers suffered most. We humans had been so proud, so sure we were the only intelligent creatures with dominion over the sky. I read articles, essays, forum posts debating the new nature of humanity, the foibles of our hubris. Others denounced the pigs as a failure of evolution, squishy pink beasts flying too high above their station. The teacher in the classroom adjacent to mine claimed to have read somewhere that the pigs were the result of some biological weapon failure.
We all struggled to keep up as news outlets, politicians, even the elementary school curriculum tried to comprehend a world where pigs could fly. Within two weeks, I had new material for the animal unit: Present the pig as one of the foremost examples of mammalian flight (known to biologists for centuries, of course).
After receiving the new, falsified lesson plans via a panicked email from my principal, I asked Maggie what she thought of the flying pig conundrum. She simply shook her head. “There’s more. Wait and see.”
Sure enough, the miracles began the next day.
No one had paid much attention to the linguists when they warned of the dangers of an idiom come to life. Of the impossible becoming possible. My first miracle happened when all of my students handed in their homework on time. Once the papers were stacked neatly on my desk, I turned to watch the pig soaring past my classroom window.
They started small—my brother finally paid back the money he owed, my daughter cleaned her room after months of nagging, my school received sufficient funding to redo the crumbling floors. But things escalated quickly as the flying pigs gathered in droves to deliver their miracles. Wars ended. The unhoused were taken in. Loans forgiven, climate change solved, prejudices erased. It turns out all it took was flying pigs to teach everyone a lesson in empathy.
And it didn’t stop there. There were reports of fish who learned to breathe out of water, pets learning to speak to their humans. One woman even claimed she turned straw into gold. The news said world peace was close at hand, that the pigs had given us a second chance.
But then, one day, Maggie tugged at my sleeve after lunch. There were three pigs grazing on the lawn outside my classroom window, wings glistening in the sun.
Maggie stared at them. “They’re leaving soon,” she said gravely.
“Leaving?” I asked, alarmed. “How do you know?”
She shrugged but remained silent.
I frowned. She hadn’t been wrong so far. “Where will they go?”
“Away,” was all Maggie would say.
They were gone before the week was out. I like to think those three outside the classroom were the same ones from the zoo, the first to fly. Halfway through our lesson about the History of the Pig in America, they rose into the air. We paused to watch them go. Instead of shooting out toward the farms to the east, as they often liked to do, they just kept rising. Up and away, just as Maggie had said, toward the sun in its sea of blue.
The rest of the pigs, all 800 million of them, left in the same way, lifting off into the atmosphere, some in groups, others alone. I’ve never seen anything so graceful as those solitary pigs floating away, becoming smaller and smaller until they vanished among the stars.
Our satellites lost track of them soon after the exodus began. It was as if pigs had never existed on Earth. The miracles collapsed beneath the weight of the panic and outrage caused by the pigs’ disappearance. The same wars resumed, costs skyrocketed, and most people drew inward at the pain of their loss. At my school, we were forbidden to discuss the pigs and what they had done. The things they had shown us were possible.
Eventually it seemed like those miserable philosophers were the only ones left who remembered the pigs. Bemoaning the disturbance of the natural balance, the inferiority of humankind compared to those winged creatures. I still listened to their radio shows with a morbid sense of fascination, though I never would have admitted it to anyone else.
They agonized over our contribution to the disaster, the inherent relationship we’d created between flying pigs and improbability.
“Who are we,” they cried, “to keep anyone, or anything, earthbound? How many others are we holding back through our silly obsession with gravity, our frivolous need to clip our own wings?”
They grew so impassioned, so frightened at the power their words might hold, that over time many of them stopped speaking altogether. The linguists, still bitter at the way they’d been ignored, refused to help them.
On the last day of school that year, I stood before my classroom window and watched the sun rise over the empty lawn. Maggie was the first student to arrive. She came and stood beside me.
“Do you think they’ll come back?” I asked quietly.
She shook her head. “Not anytime soon. I don’t think they liked us very much. Maybe they went to look for their own kind of miracle. It’s what I would do, if I grew wings…” With that, she retreated to her desk, leaving me alone at the window.
As the last few stars fled before the morning sunlight, I wondered how far away the pigs were by now. How long it would take them to bring back their miracles. Though if Maggie said they wouldn’t return, then they likely wouldn’t. After all, she seemed to know best.