Peccary

Fiction, Ruby Davis

I saw the first javelinas of my life when I was thirteen, outside my upstairs window one night in the middle of July. It was the summer we moved to Arizona and I couldn’t sleep half the time because night was so quiet there, not like in Seattle, where the streets were lit up with street lights and honking and sputtering engines. 

So I was looking out the window. It was a mother and four babies, out on the desert lawn of cactus and sand and brown bushes. I was so mad we moved back then. The old apartment had a view of the mountains and the color green and the big buildings I didn’t know the names of yet. But the javelinas made me not hate it so much. One of them, the littlest baby, was tripping over its mother’s back feet trying to catch up to her. I watched them as they disappeared into the street.

I watched outside my window every night after that, just to see if they’d come back. Every once and a while, they would. But then the numbers dwindled down to three babies without the mother, then two, then one. The last baby, fully grown by the time I was sixteen, would look in the window, right at me, like it understood what I was thinking.

Sometimes, I had dreams about the javelinas. Me and that littlest baby, the one I swore was the same as the one that looked at me through the window, would run across a green field together, the kind of thing that didn’t exist in Arizona. It would ram its snout into the back of my knee and I’d topple over laughing. Then, the javelina, which at that point I’d named Sparkles, would dig its hooves into my chest, pull my heart out through my ribs, and eat it. I’d smile the whole time, tell Sparkles that all the words I had were trapped in my heart, and once she ate my heart, she could talk to me.

I must’ve had those dreams until I came to live at home again, partly against my will, at twenty-two. I’d just gotten out of college, moved all my clothes back into my old bedroom, and remembered why I’d left Arizona. My third day home, my mother had driven me all around town, telling me how horrible everything had been since I’d left, that my father’s law firm was hiring, that there was such a nice boy working for him already, an intern who’d gone to the town’s only other high school, who I’d love since he rode horseback and collected vintage coffee makers. 

“Do we still have those javelinas?” I asked, cutting her off from talking about Oliver Poindinger. 

“Javelinas?” she laughed.

“We had a family of them living across the street. They used to walk in our yard.”

“They’re dangerous. And worse, they’re pests,” my mom said. She looked at me with a bewildered expression. “They’re wild pigs that eat the roses.”

I neglected telling my mom that her roses didn’t grow because she’d picked out living in a desert, or rather, settled for it after her father died and gave her the house and seven acres of land that came with it. “They aren’t pigs. They’re peccaries,” I said instead.

“That’s the same thing,” my mom replied, her eyes back on the road. “Anyway, back to Oliver. If you come work for your father, finally use that bachelor’s degree you begged for, you can meet him. He’ll make you a great coffee and—”

That night, I had a nightmare. In it, my house had caught fire. My eyes shot open to see the fire on my ceiling. Must’ve been heat lightning. The flames raged over me, catching onto the curtains draped on my bedframe and pouring out my window. The house’s cracking wood beams sounded like screaming cicadas and ghost trees snapping their branches in two. 

I threw the blanket off and ran out into the front yard, screaming for my parents to follow. My dad stuck his head out his window and shouted back, “Think of what our reputation will be, if we let your grandfather’s house burn to the ground like that! You know your mother’s family’s had this house for two hundred years, we can't let it go like that!”

“You won’t have any reputation to change if you’re dead!” I shouted.

Then, the dream changed in a way that made sense when I was asleep, but doesn’t make sense when I explain it now. I was watching myself from outside of my body. My body wasn’t even my body. My head and limbs were all sticking out of the house. I wasn’t sure if it was that I’d outgrown it and my arms had burst through my bedroom and my father’s office, my legs through the kitchen and playroom, and my head through where the chimney was meant to be, or I had become the house. 

It wasn’t until moments before I woke up that I saw Sparkles at the door. Her mouth was open, her tusks digging into my heart.

“Give it back!” the dream me screamed, wondering if the javelina had eaten my whole chest and stomach and I’d just replaced the empty space with the first thing I could find.

I opened my eyes to a ceiling not on fire. My heart battered at my ribs. At least it was still there. 

After that, I couldn’t stand to be anywhere near my satin sheets. I got out of bed and ran downstairs, out the door, and across the empty street. Deep down, I was hoping I’d get lost so I wouldn’t have to hear another thing about Oliver Poindinger’s coffee makers or horse named Clover or how my dad needed somebody in marketing. 

The air outside was thick as the mink coats my mother wore in winter. Summer was a bloated corpse. The coyote my parents found in the yard one year, its chest a cavity where another coyote or maybe some neighbor’s loose dog had bitten into it and dragged it to the front steps. 

After a while of wandering, my slippers stained orange from the sand and a tumbleweed caught on the hem of my nightgown, I saw it. Way off in the distance, past a cactus waving still arms in the air, the javelina. She was looking right at me. Her beady eyes. Wiry hair. She opened her mouth, the way she did in the dreams when she ate my heart, and the moonlight glinted off of her tusks.

I don’t know why, but I ran to her. She didn’t move. She just stood there, staring. I could’ve sworn she smiled. I made it to her, panting. She rubbed her pig-nose against my knee. 

“Did you dream?” she said. Her tusks caught on her upper lip as she spoke.

“Am I still?” I asked. “You aren’t supposed to talk.”

“You think that because someone told you that,” she said. “You think we don’t listen to you?” Her voice was gruff and sounded a little southern, the way my grandmother’s did.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “I guess I should’ve known.”

“I’m old,” she said. “Do you know that?”

“I do.”

“My mama died when I had just grown all the way. She was old. Before that, my brother, the runt, died. He wiggled into a horse’s fence and he was so little when it kicked him, it looked like he flew. Like the vultures. We found him all bloody the next day. Stupid domestic things. My mama carried him down to the creek. Then it was my sister, from a car. Another sister, shot by who your mama calls Officer Kingsley. He’s got her head on his wall. The last brother died a month ago, because he was old.”

“Why are you telling me this?” 

The javelina turned around and started to walk, slowly. “I’m scared.” I thought it was funny; she couldn’t pronounce her Rs quite right.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she answered. “You’re unhappy, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“I watched you today. You and your mother. You aren’t happy.”

“I’m perfectly happy,” I said, although my eyes darted away from her beady ones the moment I opened my mouth. 

“When my mother was still around, I’d follow behind her, not argue with her,” Sparkles said. “I’d do anything to have my mother back. Would you?”

I sighed and looked back toward the house. For a moment, I could’ve sworn I saw sheets of fire lighting up the dark, but I blinked and they disappeared. I thought of my dream. Of Oliver Poindinger. Of the sound of a hundred staplers at once at my father’s office. Then, of running through the yard. Of staring out the window at the javelinas, wishing for a moment that I could be wild like that.

“Fine, I don’t like where things are headed but–”

“I have a deal for you.”

“A deal?” I laughed. My father always talked about business deals, but those were with men in suits, not javelinas. In school, we learned about deals between nations, big political figures, and questions of whether or not to let a bomb loose. As far as I was concerned, javelinas were not countries or political figures or bombs.

“I’m not happy either,” Sparkles said. “I’m scared of growing old. And I’m lonely.”

“Lonely?” 

Sparkles nodded, which was funny to see, since there wasn’t much of a dip between her head and neck. “I know somebody. A coyote. He can help us.”

I laughed. “A coyote… who can what?”

“Just follow me,” said Sparkles. 

With that, she began to trot across the desert. We walked and walked until the sky had dipped back into purple instead of pitch black. The sun appeared over the mountains like a heart exposed from the chest, beating orange back into the dawn. 

Sparkles stopped at a hole. It was a great big hole, nearly a canyon, smack in the middle of two big rocks. They looked a bit like double doors.

“Down this way,” Sparkles said. She trailed straight down. I had to get on my hands and crab walk across the rocks.

In the hole, there was a clearing. Like a living room, with deer bones and brambles hung on the walls with twigs as frames. And, just as Sparkles had said, there was a coyote. He was curled up on a rock positioned like a couch. 

“Oliver,” called Sparkles.

The coyote stirred and yawned. He was a bit cute, with the pointed teeth and spotted tongue. He reminded me of my childhood dog, a pug named Leo.

“You know I don’t go by that anymore,” the coyote whined. “It’s Wolf of the Brambles now.”

“You’re not a wolf and you don’t live in brambles either,” Sparkles said. “I need a favor.”

The coyote rose to his paws and trotted over to Sparkles. “A favor?” He looked up at me, his yellow eyes boring into mine. He had an expression almost like he knew me, with his triangle ears pointed back and his almond eyes wide. “This girl?”

“Had my eye on her for some time,” Sparkles replied. “We’ve both got lives we wanna change.”

“How is a coyote gonna fix them?” I laughed.

“I’m only partly a coyote,” he replied, sharpening his claws on his couch rock. “Don’t worry. What exactly is it that you want?”

“I don’t want to work for my father my whole life.” I was astonished at my lack of hesitation. “I don’t want to fall into a marriage with that four-eyed mousey boy my mother wants me to. I don’t care if he collects coffee pots or works for my dad.”

The coyote laughed at that.

“I want to be free,” I continued. “Like the javelinas. Like Sparkles.”

“Sparkles?” the javelina asked.

“Is that not your name?”

She snorted. The coyote did too.

“You humans think you control everything,” the javelina said. “You think once you name something, it’s yours. Javelinas don’t have names. We just are.” 

“Well maybe I don’t want a name either,” I said.

“Oliver can fix that,” said the javelina, pointing her muzzle at the coyote.

“Not Oliver,” he replied. “But yes. I was human once, too.”

I scoffed. “Not possible.”

“Humans,” the javelina replied, “do not invent the barriers of possibility.”

The coyote nodded his head at the javelina. “So I traded lives with a coyote. He lives with the people now. But I live here. In peace.”

“How?” I asked, thinking of my younger self staring at the baby javelinas free in the desert. My dreams where a javelina ate my heart and I didn’t mind.

“I can show you,” said the coyote. “But you have to swear you want this.”

“I do,” I said, without hesitation. I looked at the javelina. Her, drowned in a white dress and office uniform. Me, lost in the sunset hills.

“I don’t want to be alone,” said the javelina. “I want a family back. Even if it is a human one.”

“Very well,” the coyote said. He led us to two flat rocks on the wall. Each of them had splatters of red and a thin layer of dust. The rational side of me, the one that always made me ask questions, was silent. “Lie down and sleep. When you wake, it will be done.”

I did as he said. The javelina rested beside me. At first, my heart pounded heavily in the dark. The jagged bits of rock stuck into my back and made my elbows sore. But eventually, I stopped feeling anything. I didn’t even dream.

When I woke up, the daylight outside was streaming into the cavern. I felt different. I went to rub my eyes, but instead, I hit myself in the face with a hoof. I tried to stand, but toppled over on my four feet.

“Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” I looked up to see the coyote. Instead, I was met with a head of mousy brown hair, wire-frame glasses, and splattered freckles attached to a dog’s body.

“What are you?” I screamed.

“The same coyote,” replied Oliver Poindinger’s head, “Only you’ve learned to see me right.”

Behind him, by the door frame, I saw my body. My white lace nightgown. All beneath tusks, a snub nose, and beady eyes. The javelina’s head was attached to my shoulders with a string of sticky burrs. 

“Come on,” said the javelina. “Your parents will worry if I’m not home soon.”

I looked at the Oliver-coyote. “They’ll know she isn’t me,” I said.

“They won’t,” he replied. “People see what they want. You saw me as just a regular coyote, didn’t you?”

“She pronounces her R's funny. Because of the tusks,” I replied.

“They won’t notice,” replied the javelina. “If they do, what’ll they think? It’s a coincidence, or that you’ve traded heads with a javelina?”

As she spoke, I watched the scar from falling on a rake when I was eleven on my upper arm. The freckle on my palm. The stain on my nightgown from spilled soup. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was looking at the same things: a tangle in her wiry hair beneath my head, a scuff on her hoof, a cut on her flank. 

“Fine,” I said, and followed her to the tunnel out of the coyote’s home. She stumbled, new to her legs and new to a body not set for climbing. But I was out in a flash. I walked behind her to the old white Colonial house. 

The javelina stumbled up the porch stairs, leaning on the pillars for support. Then, she struggled with the doorknob. I watched from behind a bush as my mother pulled open the door from the inside.

“Where the Hell have you been?” she shouted. She grabbed the javelina by the shoulder and yanked her in the door.

“I must’ve sleepwalked–” was the last thing I heard the javelina say.

~~~

I lived easily the first few months pretending to be a javelina. I ate bugs and garden snakes, stalked along the rocks, and ran from burly men with rifles. I remembered half those men from church.

Me and Oliver Poindinger slept every night on opposite sides of his cavern. I kicked myself, sometimes, for still ending every day in the same room as the man I ran away from. Eventually, I just figured fate was a funny thing.

I got to know the hills. The scorpions started to taste like bell peppers. The sand that scratched itches on my back. The sun that beat down on my fur. The mud I left hoofprints in. Even the bushes became the berries, the cacti became their prickly pears. The sun became the rain that bathed me. I loved it, for a while. And then I started to understand what the javelina meant about the loneliness.

The rabbits and prairie dogs would run the moment they saw me coming. I couldn’t look the vultures in the eye, since they were always gutting roadkill and the blood and entrails looked like something I could become at any moment. The other javelinas seemed to have a quiet understanding that I was not quite like them. The deer saw nothing but my imaginary tusks. And I couldn’t stand to look Oliver in the eye.

Every once and a while, I’d walk up to the old house and stare into the upstairs window. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of her. Usually, she was in some dress that shouldn’t have fit around her neck. Sometimes, she’d be in the yard with the fake Oliver, who’d nuzzle his coyote head into her shoulder. I wondered if they saw each other for what they really were.

Sometimes, I watched the coyote Oliver drive off to work. 

I watched my parents move out. 

It didn’t bother me. At least it didn’t until I saw the two of them in the backyard, followed by my mother and father and a string of guests dressed to the nines holding flowers. The javelina was in a white dress with lace flowers. Her wiry hair shed onto the V-neck, and I hated all the guests for not seeing it. 

Together, they had the life I’d dreaded. And I was left nameless, still with Oliver, only in the blistering heat, swallowing scorpions, and only speaking when an owl hooted at me. I was a terror. The burrs on my neck had fallen off and the blood had scabbed and healed, but all I had left of myself was a brain and a mouth.

That night, when everyone was gone, I went back to the house. I opened the door with my mouth and walked up the stairs as quietly as I could. I nudged open my old bedroom door, where the coyote and the javelina lay under satin sheets and a lace canopy. 

I jumped on the edge of the bed like a dog. To my amazement, neither of them stirred. Not until I set my hooves on my own shoulders, looking at the pig head that should’ve been mine. 

The javelina opened her beady eyes. Even in the dark, I could see how small they were compared to her snubbed nose and pearly tusks. I dug my hooves further into her breast. She gasped in pain.

“What are you doing here?” she cried.

I said nothing. It had been so long since I’d spoken.

Instead, I dipped my head down to my chest and bit. I tore the skin apart like I’d learned to with wriggling snakes. Pressed into the ribs with my canines, cracking them. I dug and dug and dug through blood and muscle and bone, past the lungs and the arteries. I opened my jaw as wide as I could and tore out my own heart clean and in one piece. It didn’t stop beating once it got to my tongue.

I looked back down at the javelina, the blood from the heart meant to be mine trailing all down my chin. But there was no javelina. I was looking into my own wide-open eyes. The curls of hair spread over a nightgown and blushing face. 

When I tried to swallow my own heart, it was impaled on a tusk.

---

Ruby Davis is an undergraduate student in creative writing and anthropology. You can find her writing published or upcoming in The Vincent Brothers Review, Page Gallery, The Quarterly, Ninth Heaven, and others, or find her on Substack @evenmolluskshaveweddings.