On my family’s mountain ranch, between the building reserved for dining
and the building our wood stove kept warm, lay a laboring pig, a few babies
already suckling at her side. It might have been something miraculous
if the boys and dogs were not in the market for entertainment.

Brandishing sticks and pocketing stones they found in the nearby
fields, my cousins encouraged the farm mutts to chomp and chow,
to pillage the young family of their time together. They swatted
me away when I screamed, when tiny toddler fists drummed against

the work-mentored muscles of curious teenagers. “It’s sick,
gonna die anyway,” they said, waving weapons as if cleaning
the cobweb clouds, tossing stones against the poor girl’s sweat-sheened
skin. The dogs, maws agape, haunches coiled, did not wait for each piglet

to be born. They ripped the mother from her center. Glint of spine,
birth sac debris, she looked like one big womb that gave birth at once.
The beasts pulled at entrails, sopping up blood as their snouts probed
for piglets, snapping and gulping like the slop they ate every evening.

The Andes mountains were all snaggle-toothed and serrated,
puncturing the sky like a skewer tine spinning meat upon a spit.
They witnessed the carnage on a summer-cracked plot of dirt
where no adult could intervene, no God was present. All I could do
was wait until the squealing became easy enough to swallow.

—Kaylee Salazar

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