“Mama, there’s a pig in the sky.”
.
It was forecast to rain. A histrionic thunderstorm with lightning, and so much of it, like the kind you read about in Greek mythology. The storm would arrive to quench the land; a big drink to save the plants from starvation. Heat exhaustion. Near expiration.
.
The air was sucked-dry, crisp in the bone-crunching sense. Insects were acting strange for the lack of water was making them spiral into delirium. And what about humans? They too were acting strange, seeing pigs in the sky.
.
The ground was parched. And beneath the yellow, straw-like grass, earth was ribbed and coming apart, like a piece of succulent meat teased from the bone. The land was separating, but people couldn’t know this or comprehend it, for they were concerned with their fridge freezers, thousands of which, from a certain manufacturer named CHILL, were spontaneously combusting across the country.
.
Many of these unlucky homes were hosting barbecues, making the most of the freak weather. Hunks of cow were licked with glaze, the kind you see on apples at fairgrounds and all over the faces of little children. At one particular barbecue, chicken was being cooked in two ways. First: fillets were butterflied and stuffed with garlic butter. Second: cut into generous chunks, dipped in marinade and placed on a searing hot grill.
.
“Let’s fire this boy up!” said the man grilling the meat. “Breast is best!” he quipped to an audience of three, dangling the butterflied chicken under their noses like bait. Its flesh splayed open revealing a hollowed-out centre, rubbed with butter. Meat King, as he was affectionately known, was a pitmaster who served a former life in the military. He was flipping meat while his three-year-old son was opening presents with great vigour, ice cream smeared all over his face. His wife Salad Queen worked as an environmental expert for corporates in the city, and on this day, written on her t-shirt stretched across her breasts were the words I LOVE KALE. They made a good team, Meat King and Salad Queen, balancing each other out like a macrobiotic meal.
.
The boy who saw the pig in the sky, Tomas, was running around in the garden, chasing monarch butterflies with his friend Clarissa. This was precisely one hour before he would see the ruddy swine drift away, just moments before the first smack of thunder, the opening of heavens, the inevitable purge of rain.
.
Back to the chicken. It was halved and quartered with precision before the same hands proceeded to dunk the pieces in marinade. It resembled tar, thought the person whose hands worked the flesh. Or tarmac, before it’s set in the road. That same person, a perimenopausal Aquarius, thought of sex – of blood clots and mucus and the exchange of bodily fluids during intercourse, something she hadn’t had for some time.
.
Due to the perimenopause and the country-wide deficit in Hormone Replacement Therapy, Aquarius was in a constant state of flux. When she wasn’t hot she was furious, and when her moods finally levelled off, she felt a fog pass through her, clouding her thoughts. This fog was like the kind you get at sea – shifting, pulsing, wholly untethering. Nothing could be seen with much clarity and it made her come undone, like a child riding a bike without stabilisers for the first time. It was palpable. She was exhausted. Aquarius wiped her pits with a piece of dirtied kitchen roll. She needed something cooling.
.
“Do you have ice?” she asked, hands coated in the mix. “I’d kill for a frozen margarita.” She was stood next to her sister’s husband, Meat King, admiring the way his biceps flexed with every protraction of arm as he flipped another piece of chicken with his silver prong. “In the freezer,” he replied, masking an eye roll, for his sister-in-law was always waiting for someone else to tell her what to do, where to look, how to be useful. As she pivoted on her heel, her hipbone collided with the edge of the barbecue, an injury which would later cause her epidermis to throb and bruise. She clutched Meat King’s bicep to steady herself, prompting the silver prong to slip through his fingers and land on the Indian sandstone. Freshly laid earlier that week.
.
Beads of sauce peppered the slabs in a nonchalant fashion, reminding Meat King of ‘Summertime’ by Jackson Pollock, which he saw one time at Tate Modern. He liked jazz and the Hamptons and abstract art made by angry men. He felt some quiet affiliation with these tortured souls, enslaved by the trappings of toxic masculinity. “Sorry!” said Aquarius, dabbing the beige slabs with a piece of soiled kitchen roll. He could’ve sworn he’d seen her pass the same rag under her bristly pits just moments ago. She was on her knees now and he could see right down her top to her navel. It was covered in fine hair like spun sugar. He wondered if the hormone drugs made hair sprout in funny places. Meat King had little patience for his sister-in-law’s peri-whatever-it’s-called. It made her clumsy, swung her moods, and there was a definite odour about her that hadn’t been there in the times before. He wished her ‘peri’ would progress to ‘meno’ so they could nip it in the bud and move on with their lives. Though his wife had warned him that this was just a flavour, the calm before the climacteric, womb-decimating, menopausal storm.
.
The fridge freezer was a sort of Mecca today, as the temperatures continued to climb. The weather was hot enough to boil an egg on the pavement. Fierce enough to send wildfires across Canada. Violent enough to force colour change, charring trees like pieces of overcooked bacon. But a biblical storm working its way to this very borough, would soon balance the books. It would reinstate some equilibrium that would take the edge off – people were choking, the air was so tight. “Thick and smothering,” is how someone, a guest at Franco’s party, had described it. But the children were happy enough, chasing butterflies, fingers lost in buttercream.
.
Aquarius massaged her knees to bring the feeling back. She didn’t like the sandstone and had told her sister to go for decking instead. It was much softer, more durable. But Meat King always had the last word. He set the rules while her sister zipped around washing, cleaning, sterilising, sanitising, watering, basting, greasing, polishing, ironing. So much for fourth-wave feminism. All these women in top jobs, wearing suits, demanding fair pay and bringing home the bacon, while still bearing the brunt of domestic labour. Speaking of – she would make her sister a frozen margarita. As Aquarius stood at the fridge freezer, pools of water cooled her feet and for a moment, she didn’t question a thing, only relished the feeling of great relief that washed over her overheated body. And then –
.
“There’s a flood!” she said, a manic expression fixed upon her face. “Everything has melted!” It’s true, the three tubs of vanilla ice cream had melted, as had the bag of peas, the punnet of berries, the carton of fish fingers, and packet of chicken nuggets for those ‘quick win’ weekday dinners when Salad Queen was too fatigued to cook after the succession of virtual meetings she’d been having about the decarbonisation of fossil fuels. The reserve fillets too had thawed, and there was a definite smell of on-the-turn poultry pervading the fridge freezer – of chicken returning to its flaccid state. It was unsanitary, repulsive. Everything had to go.
.
“Everything must go!” said Meat King, dashing from guest to guest with plates of chicken, both on and off the bone. Chicken nuggets were masqueraded as something else and frozen berries were blitzed into smoothies. Knowing how his wife felt about food waste, he couldn’t possibly throw it away. “It’s a moveable feast,” chortled one guest. “Like Hemingway said…” though nobody understood his niche literary reference. As guests slathered their babies in SPF, forked lettuce, and ingested meat; just ten miles away, the first storm cloud expelled a low guttural sound. Garden parasols were shot sideways, leggy foxgloves swung like pendulums, and bird baths gulped gallons of rainwater, as everything collapsed under the weight of the storm.
.
It was the first time her husband had left his barbecue all afternoon. Salad Queen was relieved to see he was finally mobile again, from the waist down, and able to help look after her –their – child. All afternoon she’d had one eye on Franco, making sure he was having the best birthday party, while the other eye was fixed on the table of gifts by the back door, where guests proceeded to pile box upon bag upon envelope to mark the passing of three years. She had specifically said ‘no single-use plastics’ in the invitation with a disclaimer written in a large typeface that specified sustainable gifts were okay and would be gratefully received (including those made from recycled, BPA-free plastics).
.
Salad Queen was looking for perfection. And she found it in the monarch butterflies circling above and around the three children, as they wafted their wands, casting bubbles into the air. This was captured on a Polaroid which would later be recaptured on her iPhone and later still uploaded to the gram. Just as she drew her eye to the viewfinder to take one last picture, she found herself distracted by a vast smudge of pink. Someone had brought a helium balloon – a giant, plastic pig! – and it rose up and above a sea of heads, bobbing about like a buoy. Her eyes followed the piece of string attached to the pig’s stomach, hoping it would lead her to the wrist of whoever had the audacity to bring such a thing.
.
The trays inside the fridge freezer were thawing as rapidly as the ice shelves in Antarctica. And while invisible plumes of smoke rose from the electrics of every CHILL in the country, Aquarius stuffed the perishable goods into cool bags. Every so often she stopped to mop the fresh pools of water with extra-absorbent towels. As she packed the last of the salmon fillets, she noticed the inflatable pig, swaying in the stuffy air like a drunk. Some primal urge from deep within drew her to the balloon, and she scrambled on all fours before rising to her feet, as if summoned by the pig itself.
.
Franco too had noticed the balloon. He loved pigs and the colour pink. He loved pigs for being pink! Who had brought this balloon and how did they know pigs were his favourite animal? His mouth stretched into a smile. But his auntie reached it first. He watched her untie the balloon from the table leg and gently tug on the string with a look of pure joy. And as the first thrump of thunder rattled the sky, Franco made his way to his auntie and his new friend, the giant pig.
.
Clouds gathered like an army creating new formations in shades of grey. Desert-like winds shook the bunting, slung from one end of the garden to the other, and all the guests looked up as the first droplets of rain fell. Oblivious to the storm curdling in the skies above their house, Franco reached out, expecting his auntie to hand it to him, the string, curled at the end like a pig’s tail. But she was consumed by something else – some other feeling he didn’t understand.
.
Aquarius threw her head back and cried, “this is what I’ve been waiting for!” as the rain came down in bucketloads, monsoon-style, as if they were in some exotic location far from there. Franco’s little fingers tugged at the string some more. “Pig,” he said. “Franco pig.” He wanted so desperately for his auntie to loosen her grip, to let him have his pig. But she was unaware of his cries and like the grass underfoot, yellow and brittle as straw, she took in water and let it fill her up, replenishing all that had been lost. Taking back what was once hers. Her fertility, her womanhood, her ability to create and sustain new life.
.
She stretched her arms out in ecstasy, releasing the string from her clammy hand. At first the pig was poised quite gracefully, suspended in mid-air as if frozen in time, and then it was snatched by the wind and carried away. Clarissa, the only child left at the party, started to laugh. Never before had she seen a flying pig. Up and up it went, circling the treetops, colliding with leaves and pieces of debris, slapped by bands of rain. As Franco’s cries intensified, Clarissa’s laughter got ever more sinister. “It’s not funny!” screamed Salad Queen, as she charged across the lawn. She scooped her son up into her arms. “It’ll end up on a beach somewhere!” Salad Queen began to cry as the remaining guests watched in horror, not knowing what to do with themselves, or their plates of lettuce and regurgitated meats.
.
As the flying pig made its way east, drifting towards another borough, just as concrete and formulaic as the last, Tomas and his mother pulled into their driveway. He was drowsy for the sugar that had been consumed at his friend’s party, and the heat burning through his yellow t-shirt. Happy to be home, he waited for his mother to unbuckle his belt, freeing him from the constraints of the booster seat he so despised. Something caught his eye, as he was lifted up and out of his throne. “Mama,” he said, “there’s a pig in the sky.”
.
.
.
Natalie Baker is a freelance copywriter who lives in Bedfordshire. Her writing has been featured in The Sunday Times Magazine, Time Out London and Elle UK, amongst others. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award (the Bridge Awards) and received a place on the Moniack Mhor Residency Programme. Her debut novel Silent as a Shade was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2022 and the Caledonia Novel Award in 2023. @NatabakeWriter.

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.