Boris wore a frown in his soft pink jowls.

His skin was smooth and plushy. He had a potbelly hanging over his belt but Boris was still skinny for a pig. He had longish bones and sharp joints. As he aged his lankiness became more pronounced.

He drove the minivan through his family’s beloved neighborhood, gripping the steering wheel with stubby hooves and staring ahead with bright eyes lurking too far back in their sockets.

In the stale space around Boris sat his family. The piglets were a trio of boys, oinking and snorting and playing video games in the backseat. His wife sat buckled in next to him, powdering her flat pig nose in front of the mirrored visor. He’d sworn himself to the chubby pig lady and lived to do her bidding, even giving her the three monsters in the backseat.

He drove them to a party, searching for the mailbox with balloons tied to it. A family friend had given birth again and so they all had to celebrate. The whole herd would be there. His wife was calm and serene, carefully aligning her hairdo so it framed her face. She loved this kind of crap. Boris hated this kind of crap.

Boris pulled into a driveway and parked the van. The piglets stormed out, running around the gigantic house to the backyard where the party had already started. Boris got out of the van and walked around. He opened his wife’s door and held out his hoof. She took it and stepped out, settling onto the soft grass.

“Oink oink,” she said, taking his arm.

“Oink oink oink,” said Boris. He kissed her pink paw and they walked together along a stone path to the backyard. She was a kind goddess to him. She knew he hated these sorts of things, but she loved that he did it for her. It made her feel special and every time she made sure he felt appreciated for it.

Didn’t stop him from hating it, though.

Boris and his wife strolled around the gigantic house, passing tall arching windows and a small red door flanked with rose bushes. They came around to a lush pasture of thick green grass with a swimming pool in it.

The party was in full swing. Little pigs, goats, sheep, and even a few young chickens ran around the pool and through the grass with abandon. The grass was littered with limp airless balloons, disposable plates and utensils, uneaten hunks of cake and melting ice cream. Little plastic streamers tangled in the blades.

Nearby were picnic tables piled with bright toys, and beyond that was a great patio extending from the rear of the house. The mothers and wives stood on the patio while the fathers congregated around a smoking grill on the other side of the yard.

His wife’s paw slipped away and Boris watched her walk up the patio stairs to join the mothers. She waddled up the steps, graceful in her flabbiness, Boris’ very own strawberry pink creampuff. She embraced the other sows and heifers and they all oinked and brayed and gossiped together.

Goddamn he loved her.

But he still hated this birthday party.

Boris looked across to the grill. The men were donkeys and horses and bulls and hogs much bigger than he. They spoke of sporting events and local happenings, searching for things to complain about and comment on. Each one wore fine summer shirts and designer shorts, drinking beer with long purple tongues.

He scanned the swarms of laughing children for his piglets and found them in the swimming pool, splashing around with a cowgirl and two goat kids. Boris watched his boys play. He’d tried to raise them in a thoughtful manner, but all three were too much like him when he was that age. They had small pointy teeth and dark hair and Boris saw himself in them all the time. It was his silent horror.

He turned his gaze away from the children. The group of fathers at the grill still hadn’t noticed him and the mothers up on the patio were absorbed in conversation. He was invisible to them.

Boris’s floppy pink ears folded back mischievously. Before eyes could find him he backed away and slinked around the edge of the house, walking back along the stone path. He planned to return to the minivan to read a book stashed in the glove box, but he paused on seeing the red door flanked by rose bushes. Curious, he grabbed the knob and tested it. The door was unlocked, and Boris slipped inside without a sound. He gently closed it behind him and took in his surroundings.

He stood at the end of a dim hallway. Boris walked the length, passing doorways to empty rooms. The whole herd was out in the backyard. At the end of the hallway he came to an open kitchen decorated with red tile. There was a deep and wide sink. Pots and pans hung from hooks, knives on magnet strips above the stove. It was a fine kitchen, he thought, even with party detritus littering the countertops. His wife would love to have a kitchen like this.

The frown eased away from Boris’s plump piggy lips but didn’t fully disappear.  He could hear himself think in this emptiness, so he drifted around the room, sniffing with his pig snout. He settled himself into a corner, leaning against the tiled countertop, and listened to the silence of the giant home, protected from the party outside.

Then came a noise.

Heavy footsteps thumped down a staircase, growing louder with every step. Boris hoped that whoever it was would walk past the kitchen without noticing him. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and he didn’t want to get into trouble. It would embarrass his wife.

The steps came closer until a fat birthday clown walked right into the kitchen, stopping abruptly when he saw Boris. The clown was a sheep man, with a bushy white beard and wooly afro. He wore a silky polka-dotted suit over his puffy body, and his dark face was smeared with colored makeup.

The sheep sweated under his colors, taking in the lanky pig before him. He smiled with unsquare teeth and waddled over to the sink. “Baa, baa!” he said cheerily, and filled a glass with water from the faucet, then lapped at it with a sharp pale tongue. Boris scratched his snout as he stared at the clown. A single sniff of him brought back so many memories.

“Baa baa,” said the clown again, giving a cheerful smile with sharp little teeth. He looked at the lanky pig man in the corner, staring into those glaring orange eyes, each one round and eerie like blood on the moon. The sheep clown bleated again and turned for the kitchen door.

“Take off your mask,” said Boris.

The sheep slowly turned, glaring at the scrawny pig with bright wary eyes. Then he smiled again, and presented his white-gloved hooves to his new friend. He went to the sink and rinsed them under the water, then rubbed at his face, wiping away the colors until only the black skin remained. He removed the gloves and fluffed his wooly beard, then fluttered his eyes innocently at the pig.

“Your real mask,” said Boris plainly. “Take it off.”

The sheep then saw the butcher knife in the pig’s hands, taken from the magnetic strip over the stove. He held it in one hoof, the other moving along the blade’s edge. Those orange eyes still glared. “Alright,” said the sheep.

He reached beneath his woolen beard and pulled. The beard and the black sheep’s face peeled away over his head to show another face.

It was long and gaunt, covered in ruddy red fur that was soaked in sweat. The reek of him was stronger without the mask. His ears were dark and pointed, and he panted for air now, layered beneath his pair of disguises. He held the sheep mask at his side by its wooly white hair. He looked at the pig with the knife and bared his crooked fox fangs.

“Since we’re such good friends now,” he said. “You can call me Shep.”

“That’s not your real name.”

“Neither is Cottonpants the Clown, but that’s what they call me. What do they call you?”

“Boris,” said the pig.

“That’s not your real name,” said Shep.

“No, it isn’t.”

Boris kept fiddling with the knife and glaring at the fox. Then he turned his orange eyes away, and reached under his pink jowl to pinch the supple flesh there. Now Boris pulled his own face off, and set the flabby pig mask on the countertop next to him.

Without the mask Boris’s face was bony and angular, patched with brown and gray fur and split by scars running across his snout and scalp. One of his ears was actually missing, the flesh there wrinkled as if it had been burned off. Just as the sheep was a fox, the pig was a coyote, mangy and hard beneath a safe fluffy costume.

He stood bare before Shep, whose fangs were no longer bared. Shep chose his words carefully, for he knew there was no such thing as a sane coyote.

“So why are you dressed like a pig?” he asked.

“I’m in a family of pigs,” he said.

“That sounds nice,” said Shep.

“It is.”

The fox in the fat clown suit gulped. “Does your family…know?”

At this Boris took a moment to think. With the tip of the butcher knife he gently scratched at his mangy neck, thinking. “They don’t know,” he finally said. “I don’t think they can know. They wouldn’t even be able to comprehend it. But my piglets…they’ve got a lot of me in them, so maybe they’ll know. They’ll still be good pigs one day…”

“Just with some coyote in ‘em, huh?”

Boris took the knife away from his own neck and went back to glaring at the fox.

“So, uh…when was the last time you…you know, ate?”

“I eat my wife’s cooking,” said Boris.

“Yeah, but… what about the blood?”

“Haven’t tasted it in years.”

“Your wife must be quite a pig.”

“The finest creature in the kingdom,” said Boris. Shep could tell he meant it.

“Well, I’m happy for you. Still it must get lonely when you’re not around your own kind. Living under that mask all the time. I sure wish I could be myself more often. It’s just that I gotta wear this sheep suit and…”

“For your job,” said Boris.

“Yeah,” said Shep.

“Because you’re a clown.”

“Yeah.”

“For kids.”

The coyote flicked the knife and Shep flinched. Boris sniffed at him again. The fox’s stink grew worse. “So what do you eat, Shep?” he asked.

The fox’s face sank. “What do you mean?”

“I guess you wouldn’t admit it, would you? You’ve got the blood smell on you. We both know it. Why else were you upstairs alone? Why else are you a birthday clown? Why else do you pretend to be a sheep? You ate one of those kids, didn’t you? You wrung their neck with your teeth, then ripped them apart, probably in the bathtub so you could clean it up, then you gobbled them down.”

“Listen, you—”

“Don’t try to weasel me, Shep.”

Shep’s fists clenched in rage, one squeezing his sheep mask. “Let me ask you something, Boris the coyote,” he said. “Don’t you miss being wild?  Don’t you remember henhouses?  Don’t you miss the moon and the meat and the stalking in the darkness?” The fox was baring his crooked fangs again but the coyote just sighed, exhausted.

“Like you said, it’s very lonely…but I’m a coyote. I was gonna be lonely either way. The hungry life is lonely. Raiding the henhouse is lonely. Stalking in the darkness is lonely. I’m still alone, but this way,” he pointed the knife at the pig mask, “I get a family, too.”

“But no blood,” said Shep.

Boris the coyote smiled. “Don’t worry. I remember it. I remember the meat and the gristle and the fat slurping down my throat. I’ll remember it until the day I die. You’ll remember it, too.”

Boris came forward, the knife held tight. Shep the fox bleated in fear and tried to turn for the door again but the coyote’s round eyes had him fixed in place, trapped in the red kitchen. Shep remembered the bathroom upstairs, the calf he’d lured along with smiles and jokes, the squeeze of her throat in his mouth, and each tender cut of her swallowed into his belly. His stomach was still full of bones and skin and veal.

The coyote stepped close and slid the butcher knife down past the fox’s collarbone. The tip of the blade pierced his shriveled heart and the fox let out a single yelp of surprise before collapsing into his killer’s arms.

Boris grabbed the dying fox by the scruff and dragged him to the sink. He tilted him over the edge to bleed out. It filled the sink like scarlet syrup.

Boris tore through Shep’s costumes. As the sheep’s wool and polka-dotted silk fell around their ankles, the fox was revealed, scrawny and soiled. Boris recoiled at the stench of him, but bit into the greasy meat anyway. He crunched the fox’s bones, which were brittle as a bird’s. The skin and hair were dry, the organs shriveled and poisonous.

Boris the coyote swallowed him entirely, then put his flabby pink pig mask back on. He washed the fox’s thick blood down the drain, then rinsed off the knife and replaced it on its magnetic strip. He put the mask and Shep’s costumes in the oven and turned it on.

The scrawny pig man left the house and walked around to the backyard, the fox still digesting in his gut. His piglets ran to him, oinking excitedly. His wife approached, bored by the heifers and sows. The pig family shared affectionate oinks as the rest of the party went on.

By the time the party ended and Boris had gathered his piglets back into the minivan, Shep the fox was settling comfortably in his small intestine. Boris helped his soft pink wife into the minivan before he ran out over the lawn, where it was dark, to bend over and shit that disgusting clown onto the grass. He then went back to his family, as always, and drove them home.

—

David W. Barbee is an author of bizarro fiction, publishing books such as A Town Called Suckhole and Thunderpussy with the wonderful weirdos of Eraserhead Press. His short fiction has appeared in Unicorn Knife Fight, Full Metal Orgasm, Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade.