Pig Road

MEMOIR (and) GRAND PRIZE
FOR MEMOIR IN POETRY OR PROSE

CINTHIA RITCHIE

 

When people ask if I had a happy childhood, I think back to the farm in northeastern Pennsylvania. I think of the heat and the drowsy murmur of flies, and the way the creek smelled late in the summer when the water turned stagnant and green. I think of all this and I hesitate. Yes, I say. Then, no. Then, yes, sometimes it was good.

That’s what I finally say, nodding all the while: that sometimes it was good.

 

Things started to fall apart the year the girl was murdered up on Pig Road, little more than a rutted trail, and along it the charred remains of a pig farm that had burned down so many years before that no one remembered. My sisters and I played there, among those ruins, inside the blackened cement foundation, digging around for treasures: canning jars, leather shoes, pieces of cloth we folded and stuck in our pockets.

The rest of the road was undeveloped; woods on one side, marsh on the other. The air was heavy with a rot that made us feel drunk as we ran through the weeds, our legs scratched and bitten beneath the cheap shorts we wore. I was thirteen that year, tall and thin with a boy’s lithe body. My hair hung long and straight, and I walked with the loose, confident stride of a country girl. No one messed with me, not since the year before when I had bloodied the nose of a girl who teased my little sister. I hadn’t done this for my sister, but for that giddy, pulse-quickening moment of seeing a fist coming at me and waiting until the last possible second before raising my own and feeling it connect, a sickening, exhilarating crush against my knuckles and then blood, so much blood, spilling down her face.

 

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