Lady

Terry
I woke up that Saturday to two things; one familiar and one strange.

The familiar thing was the same thing I woke up to every Saturday, the smell of salty fried bacon. The smell was so strong that my taste buds woke up next. My mouth started watering and I felt my stomach grumbling and churning.

In that moment - the moment before my hearing kicked in - all of my senses agreed it was a regular Saturday.

It was my hearing that shattered the Saturday stereotype and delivered the sensory seasoning that I least expected to go along with bacon - screaming.

I guess, before I go on, I should give you an idea of how all this came about. My name is Terrance Lyall Tkachuk and I'm a poet and a pig farmer.

I left the farm to make something of myself, to become a great poet, to learn the ways of the world. Growing up everyone called me "Terry", then I went to college; I made everyone call me "Terrance" because I thought it would make me seem like less of a hick. Surrounded by the chaos of the city I learned the joys of simplicity. I was lifted up and broken down in that city. I drank and partied and did all the things I had dreamed of while growing up on the farm.

I found love - I lost love. When the city was done with me I left with my sorrow, an English degree, and a son.

Lucinda
I remember exactly how Terry and I met.

I had lived in a sparse one bedroom house, provided by the research company, on the edge of town for a year. When I first moved in I made an effort not to decorate or personalize the house in any way; I didn't want it to feel like home. My career was too important to fall into the small town trap. I hadn't even bought a television set - I stopped at the town book store on the way home on Fridays instead.

I hadn't made any effort to get to know the locals and I spent my weekends alone. I wasn't there to make friends, I was there to get a job done. My schedule was tight and my time valuable. My only indulgence was once a week when I allowed myself an hour at the local bar to have a Caesar and unwind.

It had been a rough day. My project was going nowhere, and shipment of new lab animals never arrived. I was tired, frustrated, and being a total bitch. I had been sitting at the bar for almost ten minutes without so much as a glance from the bartender when the prick beside me started shouting.

He was sitting directly to my left, close enough to bump elbows, and his voice thundered into his cell phone. I snapped at him, "Shut the hell up and go outside!" He didn't pause, he didn't even look at me, he just finished his sentence – at full volume – and then shut his phone with a clap. He turned to look me square in the eyes and said, “looks like we're both having a crappy day, let's get drunk.”

He raised his hand, flashed two fingers at the bartender, then swept them down toward the counter to indicate exactly where the drinks should land. I left the bar stumbling and didn't even know his name. The next week he was waiting for me and we introduced ourselves.

Over the next few weeks we became great friends but it was difficult for us to get close; Terry had a lot of baggage and had made his peace with the life of a single father. His son, Ben, had been raised without a mother and was distrustful of any sort of feminine intrusion in his life.

My relationship with Terry always felt as if it was hanging in limbo between professional and romantic. He provided animals to our lab for research and every Wednesday was date night.

Terry
I ran to the kitchen. I thought maybe Ben had burned himself making breakfast. The smell of fried pork was strong all through the house and I heard muffled screams of pain. As I got closer to the kitchen both the smell and sound got stronger but when I got there the kitchen was empty. A small window over the sink was open just a sliver and through that narrow wedge poured the abominable din.

Beyond the window I could see the back yard, it was teeming with activity. Men in military uniforms ran this way and that: shouting, screaming and strapping big cylinders to their backs. They kept casting furtive glances towards my barn. I couldn't see the barn from where I was so I sped to the patio doors. From there I could see the source of the chaos, I could see the horror.

It was my dead pig, Lady.

I haven't really told you about Lady yet, have I? That would be pretty important. Baby Ben was almost a year old when Lady was born; it was my first year home from college. It was Christmas and dad spent the whole holiday in the barn helping with the delivery. My father had always had an eye for which of the sows would be good for breeding. The moment he saw Lady he had gotten a look of pride, a look I had only rarely seen, and not once since I had run off to the city.

As soon as Ben was old enough to carry a bucket it was his job to watch over the sows. He didn't get an allowance, he got a share of the profits from Lady's offspring. She lived a lot of years and threw plenty of good litters. She was a breeder all her life, and Ben was beside her for every birth. I'm sure in the beginning he only did it for money to buy toys - but in the end he loved that pig and she loved him back.

Lady was nearing the end of her life, she had no more piglets left in her, and she was sick. She was the one thing in the world Ben didn't rebel against. Ben had been on the other end of the line the night I met Lucinda, that particular shouting match was over a night he had spent drinking with his friends. They were just kids, not one of them older than sixteen. I spent a lot of my time yelling at him when all I really wanted to do was hold him and protect him, keep him from the pains I had suffered in the city.

At a time when his hormones were raging and every day seemed more confusing than the last, Lady was the only simple thing in Ben's life. He fed her, cared for her, and when her pain seemed too much to bear Ben went to Lucinda to see if she had anything in her lab that could ease Lady's suffering.

Lucinda
I remember the first time I saw Lady. She seemed lean; I was never certain if it was the sickness or the fact that she had a bigger pen with more room to run. Terry had told me stories about Lady. He had built her up so much the last thing I expected was a runt. Many of the pigs that Terry sold the lab were between eighty-five and ninety kilograms - Lady was a hair under sixty.

When Ben led her in I was, at first, a little angry. I didn't have a lot of extra time on this project and tending to sick animals wasn't really my job. But for the first time I saw a crack in Ben's wall of defiance. There was tenderness in Terry's son.

I performed a few tests and soon realized Lady was a perfect candidate for my research. Our work at the lab revolved around developing new inhibitors to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs. Lady's liver was cancer-ridden and failing. It was poisoning her blood, she had less than a month to live.

I had a chance to help both my career and my social life in a single stroke. I am certainly not the type of woman who passes up a chance to better herself, so I took Lady in.

I missed my date with Terry that week because I was performing the transplant. I spent the first hour removing her diseased liver and clearing cancerous tissue from her abdomen. Still, she was dead the following week.

The inhibitor worked perfectly, her body accepted the new organ and less than an hour later showed no signs of rejection. My assistant and I were thrilled to discover that the liver had begun transforming her blood type. The stem cells from the new liver invaded her bone marrow, the organ and our drug worked together to create an environment in which host and organ could peacefully coexist.

I was preparing to call Ben with the good news when one of my colleagues came to me with an x-ray. I stood for a long time with the phone in my hand, staring at a small dark spot in the tissue surrounding Lady's new liver. I had missed a small amount but the inhibitor had weakened her immune system. The cancer spread at a phenomenal rate. Lady's new lease on life was terminated at the point of a pentobarbital filled needle.

Company policy stated I couldn't allow trade secrets to be transported off property. Terry, Ben and I buried her by a poplar in the field behind the lab.

I was mortified the next day to see that her grave had been dug up. At the time I thought it must have been a local dog. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Terry
Lady was about fifteen feet tall by the time she got home and the soldiers were trying to kill her with fire. My mouth watered involuntarily at the smell despite the revulsion I felt. She was staggering and crashing around, her flesh was a mottled colour, a blend of pink and brown and tan. I could hear screaming but none of the military personnel seemed to be injured.

The area was thick with oily smoke. A man in camouflage rushed me and tried to push me back in the house. His forearm crashed into my chest and I was thrown onto my rump. A giant hoof came down onto him and as his legs broke he let out a sharp yelp. Strands of pulsing flesh coursed down the hoof and seeped into the soldier's uniform. It pulsed into him and his face twisted into an expression of horror. As the limb lifted he was pulled into the air and by the time the hoof came down for its next step the man had been, how can I put this - integrated. He was a part of the leg, his features blending as more of those terrible strands enveloped him.

I scrambled away and ran through the house towards the front, hoping to get to my truck. I screamed Ben's name over and over - he was nowhere to be found. I heard a crashing noise and spun to see Lady staggering into the back of the house. The leg that had just absorbed the soldier was heavier than her others and she fell through the wall into the kitchen. I saw her lash out with the opposite hoof and take another soldier into her seething embrace. She had already grown another foot or two. Many of the soldiers were backing away, either afraid of sharing their comrade's fates or possibly of injuring their squad-mates.

From atop the mountain of pork stared two tiny eyes. Her head hadn't grown at the same rate as the rest, her body was heavier near the front and her hind legs were forced to hop to keep up. Everything was out of proportion.

I shouted Ben's name again and again while Lady struggled to free herself from the tangled timbers of my broken home. My house leaned to one side and came crashing flat as the supports on one were reduced to toothpicks. Lady rose from the rubble and turned to the sound of my voice. I knew I only had about ten meters between myself and my truck but it felt like the breadth of all of Saskatchewan.

I wanted to call out to Ben again, to make sure he was okay. When I opened my mouth my throat made a sort of pop and gurgle; I felt my knees go weak.

Lucinda
To say that I was becoming disheartened with my lot in life was putting it lightly. The experiment with Lady was an abject failure. The drug had prevented the rejection of the transplant but it had made Lady highly receptive to infection. In addition Ben had been livid, he trusted me less than ever. Terry hadn't called in over a week.

I knew that Terry didn't blame me for what had happened, he was too kind and much too wise for that. Terry always took things in stride. He was consoling his son, using this time to bond with his estranged son. Their common grief was mending old wounds.

Saturday morning I woke up early and went for a long walk. Afterwards I made myself a light breakfast and then sat out on the back porch in the morning sun to read. I went back in for lunch and spent an hour on my laptop going over the results from the latest series of animal trials. The results confirmed what I already knew, the inhibitor never should have been used in its current state.

Outside the sky darkened and I heard a rumble. I'd checked the forecast the day before and the meteorologist had called for clear skies and sun all day; apparently I wasn't the only scientist who was down on her luck. I ran to the back porch to save my book from the rain and arrived just in time to see a pillar of meat demolish the house beside me. The giant leg hit the earth with such force I was thrown to the ground.

I was on my back but I couldn't see sky above me, only meat. Another leg came down in my back yard only a few feet from me. I rolled over and pushed myself up. I tried to run but something held my feet. I looked down and saw a sinewy tentacle encircling my left ankle. It looked like a cross between exposed muscle tissue and a Slim-Jim. I reached down to pull it off and as my hand touched it I felt my skin sink into it, merge with it.

It felt as if my skin had been flayed and every nerve exposed to the summer sun. I recoiled for a heartbeat then was touched by joy. More of the tendrils coursed up my arm and this time I welcomed them. I had never felt such pure bliss; I heard my own scream trail off into a sigh as the tendrils filled me with endorphins.

From inside the flesh, from inside my own mind, I heard a voice calling me.

Terry
I was so happy when Lucinda was pulled into the fold. I called out to her through nerves laced together across a hundred fused bodies. It was like tin cans and string, every one of us could think to the others, and above the din of a hundred minds was a single simple loving being, my pig Lady. Every one of us felt the joy of taking in a new member. We all felt the wind across our skin as we moved from town to town, growing with each step.

I can only describe the experience as liberating. We had no decisions to make, no pressure, no deadlines. We were led by Lady. We flexed, digested, pumped and filtered blood. Our influence was no different than that of any other organ or cell. I had never believed it was possible to feel so needed.

Lucinda was the first to learn what could be accomplished through force of will. The signals she sent back to me were strong and determined, we had been apart our whole lives and she couldn't stand it any longer now that we were of one flesh. I could feel her moving up through the leg towards me, the tendrils pulling her in any direction she resolved.

She moved into the chest cavity and I felt her blend with me, our bodies became entwined for the first time in our relationship. As our cells mingled I finally understood the truth of poetry, the glory of two woven souls. She was a woman of science, she found the beauty in logic and made sense of the universe by quantifying it. I had always enjoyed the mystery of life.

I could no longer feel where my arms ended and her torso began. I felt no fear, she felt no fear. We felt only love.

Lucinda
I am aware of the destruction we caused. I recognize that we were seen as a monster. I still remember the exhilaration of apartment buildings crumbling beneath us and the rapture of those we made family.

Those were the greatest three days of my life. I remember the sting of the bullets and the sadness we felt when bombs took our family members, leaving charred husks on the path behind us. I also remember my overwhelming sense of pride. I had done this. I had brought these people true happiness. My research had allowed Lady to live and to be with her family again, at least part of her family.

She kept searching for Ben. We all kept searching for Ben. We weren't complete without him. Terry and I both wanted him to know what it was like to be one with his family, to truly understand each other's perspectives.

All around us the city of Regina lay in ruins. Buses overturned, schools flattened, hospitals emptied. None of it seemed necessary any more, we had a better way. We couldn't detect another living creature for miles. The military had evacuated the rest of the city and most of the surrounding communities. Even the livestock had been taken, or burned.

We stopped to rest for a short while. We knew a long day of walking to get to the next city, to continue our search for Ben was ahead of us.

When we awoke, Ben had found us.

Terry
I had been too hard on Ben. He wanted to find his own way just as I had. When I saw him below us I had such mixed feelings. We all did. We wanted him to be happy, we wanted him to be a part of the family. The part of me that was still distinct knew he wanted something else, he wanted to be his own man.

Ben called out to us. Lady bent down slowly to put her enormous head close to his face. He was trembling, we could all see that. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. We waited for him to come into the fold on his own, we didn't need to use the tendrils, he had found us. He reached out a hand to touch our snout and a flash of metal made a thousand voices cry out in my mind, "We are betrayed!"
The needle punctured the flesh just below Lady's left eye. Ben emptied the syringe into our bloodstream and muttered, "I'm sorry, they told me I had to do this. I love you, Dad". Lucinda sent out a message to the rest of the body informing us that we would have to separate or die. She could feel the immunostimulant going to work already. Lady's own body would push us out or kill us all in a matter of hours.

Lucinda saved us, her will pushed us free before the immunostimulant could pass through our veins.

Lucinda and Terry
That's our story, doctor. That is exactly what happened. I know we seem freakish to you, I know it is hard to tell where Terry ends and Lucinda begins, but we don't want the cure. We want you to understand why we would like to stay together, as one. You can lock us up, study us, poke us and prod us, we don't mind. We understand the need to do testing on us. But we also understand the poetry of our situation, we are two adults who, four days ago, were afraid to love – and now could never bear to be apart.