Robert Long Foreman

You Can Do With It Whatever You Want

          There wasn’t much that Weird Pig was afraid of, only a few specific things he could name, when asked. Flying bullets made the list, as did nuclear war. 

          There were things he wasn’t afraid of, exactly, but which could make him squirm or recoil. He didn’t like heights and bugs, but he wouldn’t have said he was afraid of either thing, not exactly. He just didn’t like them. 

          He had reasonable, everyday fears, like his fear of getting run over by one car then another as his carcass lay rotting under the country sun until the road crew finally came to scrape his body up and haul it away. All pigs had that fear.

          It wasn’t a fear, exactly, but Weird Pig was host to a parasitical sense of dread that jaundiced his mornings and sleepless nights. He would lie awake on his straw and wish he could be struck by lightning: something to give him a jolt of some kind; something that would mean something in his life had changed, even if it was for the much, much worse.

          Weird Pig started setting fires. Not big ones, not at first. They started small, and he never intended for them to grow like they did, though if he’d been honest with himself he would have admitted that growing was pretty much the only thing fires did, aside from being put out and turning things to ash. Growth of a fire is as inevitable as growth of a pig. 

          He didn’t mean to burn down the house of the widow Emma Trombley. He’d never met her, and hardly knew that her house was there. But there was brush that ran up against the house, and dry grass on the other side of that for a stretch of probably twenty feet, and at the end of that was a book of matches Weird Pig ignited and threw on a pile of gas-soaked logs with fireworks underneath them, which he’d put there, carrying it with a blank face from the bed of his pickup and arranging it with great care, as if it were not a pile of things he wanted to set on fire. 

          Weird Pig meant nothing by it. It wasn’t a statement of political protest. He had nothing against the logs and fireworks. He just liked to watch things burn. If one thing led to another, it was just a chain reaction. It was scientific.

          On the roof of the nearby retirement home, Weird Pig ignited an old TV. He’d taken it up there to throw a Molotov cocktail at it. He’d put two other Molotovs inside the TV already, behind the glass of the screen, which broke when he threw the first Molotov. 

          The whole thing exploded. Weird Pig laughed and laughed, and squealed as he fled the scene down the fire escape and back to the woods out of which he’d carried the 40 oz. bottles and big can of gasoline. Molotov cocktails, said Weird Pig later, are the easiest things in the world to make.

          It wasn’t as if anyone in the retirement home had died. They had lost their homes, but they were going to lose them soon anyway. Weird Pig watched from a safe distance as the ambulance crews evacuated the aged residents from the building on stretchers. Most of them had no more than five years left to live, he said aloud, from behind a tree, talking only to himself.

          You just pour in the gasoline. That’s what Weird Pig said at the barn, to his friends, the animals, the next night and the night after that. You make sure it’s a bottle you’re putting it in, or else it’s not a Molotov. You just pour in the gas. Enough gas, mind you. Stuff in a rag. Simple. You can do with it whatever you want.