FAST FICTION #1: PIGGY

He stared at the pig for a very long time. He felt almost as if he couldn’t move until he made a decision, as if the pig would know his intention, and would bolt out of his bedroom if his thoughts were unclear in any way. It stared right back at him, seeming to mock him with its beady but kind black eyes.

The pig was spotted and blue, and had been given to him on his fourth birthday, two years before the day that he now sat on his bed across from the dresser where it had stood, smiling at him day at night, for all the intervening seasons. That smile was what kept him affixed to his bed, made him unable to cross the room and pick it up. The pig knew, somehow. *The pig knew*.

It knew that he was just a small moral decision away from picking it up and smashing it to bits. Its little ceramic life was about to be snuffed out, and still it smiled at him. Why couldn’t his parents have bought him one with a removable bottom? Why did he have to destroy it in order to get at the money inside? After a long time, after the parallelogram of sun had swung a perceivable amount across his bedroom wall, he realized that it was probably his parents’ way of getting him to make this very decision. To determine whether the thing he wanted the money for was really worth annihilating his benign little pig friend.

And was it, really? Was the amount needed even in there? It had been so long since he had started tossing his grandpa’s spare change into the bank that he had no idea how much it contained. It had been heavy on the rare occasions he had picked it up, cupping it like a dinosaur egg in his palm. It was so loaded down it felt solid, like a hand grenade – or at least what he imagined a hand grenade would feel like. Would it explode like a hand grenade when he dropped it?

He supposed he should think about how he was going to do it, if he was going to do it at all. It seemed unfair to drop it, like a betrayal to the little pig that had shared his room with him for so long. He supposed he should use a hammer. He at least owed it the dignity of looking into the little painted dots of its eyes as he dealt the final blow...

He almost laughed at himself. Final blow? Dignity? Was he really thinking that he owed this unfeeling little hollow rock anything, that it would actually expect some sort of compassion from him? After all, even it wasn’t an inanimate object, it had been *made* this way, with only one possible ending in place. The only way to get out what you put in was to smash it. That was its purpose.

So why was he still sitting on his bed? What was stopping him? The pig wasn’t going to answer.