Fine China and Swine

They said she was mad.

Not with any sentiment as dark as malice, or at least not exactly. They just used that tongue-clucking, tilted-head tone people use when someone stops playing by the rules. When someone removes the lace from the curtains and starts growing wildflowers instead of roses.

“She actually used to be... sort of normal,” the butcher muttered to the baker. “She taught piano. Had that shy, quiet little husband who sold shoes. What was his name again?”

They no longer exactly remember, and maybe that was always the point.

She didn't take much when she left the house on Hazel Street. Just her books, her perfume, and three heavy trunks of clothes she hadn’t worn in years — gowns she once called “ridiculous” and now called “essential.” She also took a single teacup with a crack in it and a chipped plate shaped like a scallop shell. 

She left the wedding china. She'd never actually wanted it anyway.

The farmhouse was already hers, an inheritance from a great-aunt no one remembered. It sat just past the willow grove, just down a little dusty dirt road that likely hadn’t seen a carriage in half a century. The house was crooked, and the roof leaked in four different places. Sometimes crows congregated on the roof after a storm, looking for wayward bugs and other prizes. It was perfect.

The pigs came with the land.

They were half-feral and vaguely pink, with beady dark eyes like muddy marbles. At first, she only watched them from the window, wary. But then one day, she noticed they had been watching her, too, in that way animals do when they know something about you that you don’t yet know yourself. First, she fed them. Then, she talked to them, tentatively and quietly. Then, she danced with them in the golden hour, as it seemed like the most appropriate time for such goings-on.

“They say I’m mad,” she told them one evening, reclining on the grass in a dress the color of old, dried blood. “But the truth is, I’m just finished.”

And she was. She was finished apologizing for her voice, her laugh, and her hunger for all sorts of exciting things. Finished folding herself into half-measures and polite silences. She was definitely finished saying "thank you" when what she really wanted to say was "don’t touch me."

The pigs didn’t answer, but one of them placed a gentle snout in her lap in a silent show of support. That was enough.

The townspeople took to whispering when they passed her gate. She never locked it, because she didn’t have to, because no one dared go past the willow trees. “She feeds them by hand,” someone whispered. “I hear she even lets them into the house,” hissed another. One woman claimed she saw candles in every window, all lit at once, like a séance or a wedding was going on inside. Maybe even something worse.

“She’s always alone,” the grocer’s wife said. “Except for the pigs.”

That part was true.

But she liked being alone. (For now, anyway.) She liked the silence of wide rooms with no one in them who was asking her to shrink for no good reason. She could light all the candles she wanted simply because it pleased her. She wore perfume because it made her feel like a badly-kept secret. She poured red wine or Earl Grey tea into fine china and sat on the porch at dusk, surrounded by soft oinks and rich golden light while crows squawked in the distance.

Sometimes she laughed. Loud, unfiltered laughter that rose through the trees and made birds scatter. “She was always a little touched,” the librarian said. “Even before the divorce.” No one ever mentions what happened to the husband. Not anymore.

But occasionally, someone swears they saw him at the edge of the grove once. They say he had mud on his cuffs and a nasty scratch down one cheek. His eyes were wide and startled like someone who had seen a ghost that looked an awful lot like regret.

No one asked questions. No one really wanted answers. Meanwhile, she lived.

She embroidered things that didn’t really need embroidery, just because. She read poetry to the pigs. She bathed beneath the stars, unashamed. Sometimes she wore the crown she made from rusted nails and ivy and laughed like a woman who finally understood the joke.

They said she was mad.

But the pigs followed her everywhere, and the wind listened when she felt like talking. And every time she raised her cracked teacup to the setting sun, the whole world paused, just for a second, to see what she would do next.

* This freewriting exercise is part of the full moon edition of the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar-centric writing challenge about consistency, creativity, and storytelling.