I had only planted the clockseeds yesterday. Not only that, the air was dry as an empty lung. And yet there they were: three fresh hooves protruding from the dirt.

“How is that even possible?” Nancy said. “It’s not possible, right? It’s not even pig season.”

“It’s always pig season,” I said.

“Where’d you get those clockseeds?”

“The Meat Orchard. You know where I got them. Don’t play dumb.”

But playing dumb was one of Nancy’s ways to tell me she wanted sex. We shed our clothes and rolled around the dirt, careful not to flatten the harvest.

By the time we finished, a fourth hoof had surfaced. Nancy’s skin gleamed like oiled leather, as she kneeled to inspect it. “That grew too fast,” she said. “Didn’t it? What’s happening?”

I shrugged. “Nothing’s happening. I mean, something’s happening. I’m gonna grow these things and sell them. That’s what’s happening.”

She reached out to touch a hoof, tentatively, and pulled back. “Those scare me.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” I lied.

We gathered our clothes and went inside.

We had a big afternoon planned, me and Nancy, but idle piddling kept us busy until sundown. Before bed, I checked the garden.

There was a fifth hoof, now. It stood taller than the other four, none of which had grown since my last visit, as if the newcomer had siphoned their vitality.

Next morning, I woke up the chained to a radiator. Nancy did this sometimes, afraid I would leave her. I sleep like a tranquilized mule, barely stirring as she drags me off the bed and across the floor. Once I shook off my morning stupor, I screamed as loud as I could until she got up and unlocked me. Then I put on a robe and shuffled outside.

Plunged into the dirt were nine pig snouts, jammed down like bulbs; the rest of their bodies stuck out like muddied balloon-animals, legs twitching frantically, bellies rippling as though the soil itself were inflating them. Their pink rumps and slick, whiskered backs swelled higher with each breath as they strained against gravity. The sound of the pigs’ grunts—buried in the earth—vibrated through their spines.

It took a while to gather and wash the crop. Weirdly, the pigs were light. Hollow bones, maybe. Their teeth clicked and shuffled like dice in a cup, never quite still.

I quickly asserted dominance over the pigs, treating them in such a way that an accelerated Stockholm syndrome took hold. They licked my hands, rolled onto their backs for bellyrubs, and squealed with gratitude when I fed them their own washwater.

By lunchtime, they had all pledged themselves to me.

They trailed after my steps, oinking hymns in a language only I could understand. When I sat, they sat. When I stood, they rose. When I laughed, they bleated in chorus. It was devotion bordering on religion—and I was their god of mud and offal.

Nancy didn’t like it. She thought my ego was already too big. I begged to differ. Moreover, I wouldn’t be a cult leader for much longer. “I’m just getting them docile so I can sell them without a fuss,” I said.

“There’s always a fuss,” she said.

I huddled the pigs into my truck and took them to Birthwatch.

Birthwatch was a membership-only retail warehouse where they monitored ovulation cycles. Nobody knew why the store’s administrators did this or why they called the place Birthwatch. They had the best stuff and the best prices, though, so nobody cared, even when security guards singled out women to inspect their reproductive health.

Normally, there’s a long vetting process in the entranceway, similar to an airport, with security guards performing strip searches, beating the truth out of shoppers, and so on. Today, confidence got the best of me—I had no intention of going through the motions of a prole.

With the pigs occupying my vanguard in V-shaped formation, I stormed into Birthwatch and bludgeoned through guards, turnstiles, fertility kiosks, ovulation scanners, hillocks of duty-free gadgets and consumables that exploded all around us in dreamlike plumes. Shoppers old and young, healthy and decrepit dove out of our way as we continued down the Main Drag. At last, we breached a plywood partition marked “ACQUISITIONS.”

With a collective shit on the floor, the pigs ushered me across the expanse of a hazmat locker humming with hidden engines. Fluorescent lights sputtered above towers of filing cabinets, each labeled with a woman’s name and a date circled in red.

Ahead was an unmarked steel door. I quieted the pigs and knocked politely, assertively. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing.

I ordered the pigs to break it down.

Inside, we found a small bald man in a sickly-green Birthwatch uniform; peering over a clipboard, he inspected a half-naked woman, with clinical detachment. His eyes flicked up at me for a second, then back to his task, as if I were a passing ghost. The woman, too, seemed indifferent, unaware of the long breast that hung out of her creased gown like a kneesock, its surface stamped with faded calendars and official seals, fabric torn where the flesh pressed through.

“You can’t be here,” snapped the man, studying the exposed breast. “The acquisitions department closed an hour ago.”

“Department?” I traded knowing glances with the pigs. “It’s only two o’clock. Look, I’m here to talk to a serious person. You don’t look serious. Where’s the Buyer’s Club?”

“Quiet.” With his thumb, the man pushed the woman’s nipple as if it were a button. She flexed her jaw. I noticed that most of her sclera were bloodred.

I said, “You’re the acquisitions manager? It’s pig season and—”

“Quiet!” He palmed the breast and slowly lifted it up and down, gauging its weight.

The pigs didn’t like that, for some reason. The semi-unison of their clicking teeth escalated into a collective gnash too loud to be real.

What happened next unfolded in an oneiric frenzy. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the Buyer’s Club.

A gunfight broke out in the parking lot. Two of the pigs were shot dead. Protesters sprang from the asphalt as if conjured, picket signs in hand, making a stink about how pigs are almost human. One sign said: “HOOVES ARE FEET IN DISGUISE.”

Most of the protesters were gunned down as quickly as they materialized.

Frazzled, I leapt onto the biggest pig, ordered it to giddyap, and nailed its blood-smeared ribs with the blade of my heels. It howled like a wraith, and we tore through the chaos. The other pigs chased us. Bullets whizzed past, ricocheting off the asphalt.

We emerged unscathed and thundered through the security barricades without incident.

Nancy awaited me on the front steps as the pigs and I loped home like outlaws at dusk. Lips pursed, she turned and stepped inside.

“Nothing happened,” I said after washing my face and fixing myself a cocktail.

“Nothing happened,” she said, blinking at me with that flat, Slavic opacity of emotion.

“Do you know where I put the rest of the clockseeds? I want to grow a new batch. This one’s too…unpredictable.”

She looked me up and down. “I want a divorce,” she said lifelessly.

“Divorce? Don’t be dramatic. The next batch’ll be better.”

“Next batch? Why was there a first batch? I don’t understand you. We don’t understand each other.”

“What’s to understand?” I asked. “Why is everybody pretending not to know what’s going on?”

She harrumphed. “The only person pretending is you.”

“Are you trying to start a fight the first day of pig season? That’s unsportsmanlike.”

“This isn’t a sport. And there is no pig season. You made that up.”

I paused. “I didn’t make it up.” I reflected. “Everything’s made up, technically.”

Nancy cocked her head, disturbing the blade of her pale bangs. “That doesn’t make sense. I don’t even know what that means. Ack!” One of the pigs had snuck inside, slipped beside her, and poked its snout underneath her sundress. Stealthy move—even I hadn’t noticed.

She stomped on the pig’s head, cracking the skull. The wounded creature oinked in agony, then spasmed, gasped, defecated. Died.

“Heck and piss,” I said. Nancy stormed away. I washed the floor, dragged the corpse into the backyard, dressed it like a scarecrow, crucified it, and erected the effigy in the middle of the garden.

After I fed the pigs and the sun went down, we made love.

I like to stick out my tongue during sex. Nancy said it was weird when I started doing it. I told her that sex is weird. It’s animalistic, too. And animals stick out their tongues all the time—what’s the big deal? If she didn’t want me to do that, we might as well shake hands and play with ourselves.

Nancy came around, but coming around just meant finding something else to complain about. That evening, she accused me of making animal noises. “Pig noises,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

I reminded her about the animalistic nature of sex. We continued to fuck as she opined that sex could just as easily be a civilized enterprise if the right people were doing it. “An animal in bed is usually an animal in life,” she said.

“Are you calling me ‘Wrong People’?” I protested, tonguing her nipple. “Sex is part of life, by the way.”

A pig entered the bedroom, as if summoned. Or it had been there all along.

Its bristled back glistened with a mixture of sweat and dust, each hair a tiny, trembling antenna. The snout was long and nimble, sniffing the air in consternation, and the pupils of its black eyes flickered like nascent stars.

Nancy screamed.

I climbed off her and chased the pig around the room, shouting invectives. Without support, it hurt to be naked; my genitals smarted as they rubbed against my thighs.

I tried to stomp on the pig’s tail. It was too fast. , it bounded over a windowsill and disappeared into the night.

Flustered, I said: “I take for granted how hard it is to run around in the nude. Anyhow, I think they’re evolving.” I eyeballed Nancy. “That fucker didn’t listen to a word I said. Didn’t he look bigger? Maybe they’ll just keep growing and never stop. What’ll happen then?”

Next morning, the pigs were the same size. I decided to preemptively euthanize them. It was the right thing to do under the circumstances.

I couldn’t find them. A faint smear of mud led upstairs and vanished into the drywall, as if swallowed by the house. Nothing more.

I looked all over—the backyard, the gorge, the bomb shelter, the abduction zones, the faith foundry, even the clocktower.

I found them on the Hill Where Nothing Grows.

Normally, I try to keep in shape. I used to, anyway. Every year, I let myself go a little more.

Not halfway up the Hill, my lungs started to burn. Evidently, I hadn’t exercised in a while.

The pigs stared down at me like a jury of philosophers. They snorted amongst themselves whenever I lost my footing and rolled to the bottom, limbs whirling in futility. The snorts were probably laughter. I wasn’t sure. Do pigs laugh?

When I got too dizzy to climb straight, I gave up and went home.

The pigs came back an hour or so later. Nancy and I were fooling around in the shower. One at a time, they took turns ramming the door. Luckily, I had reinforced the glass with a quantum substrate, so they only ended up bruising themselves. Nancy screamed in my ear the whole time about bad husbandry.

After everyone calmed down, we made up. Not just me and Nancy, but the pigs, also. I even prepared them BLT sandwiches as a facetious peace offering. I figured they would reject them. Apparently, though, pigs are opportunistic feeders—cannibals under duress—and they hadn’t eaten since the Birthwatch episode; they devoured every morsel, then oinked for seconds.

I couldn’t decide whether to kill them or sell them.

It might not have been a good idea to quit my job. I would have been fired anyway, but I hadn’t been sure when the hammer would fall, so I preemptively started a riot in the storage closet that quickly spread throughout the catacombs. It was almost artistic, that act of baboon-assed antagonism. Hubris got the best of me. I made no effort to conceal my instigation, and they canned me on the spot.

Litigiously, I took the pigs back to Birthwatch.

The acquisitions manager had been relegated to a greeter, it seemed, patting down male customers and checking every woman’s pulse. He had on a different uniform and wore a grin so tight as to crush the resentment behind his fistful of crooked white teeth. I wondered if the demotion had something to do with me.

It did: his eyes narrowed when he saw me.

Without a second thought, the manager shoved aside the elderly lady in his clutches and lunged forward with surprising agility. I’m not that quick on my feet and he would have had his way with me, but my pigs counterattacked en masse, leaping into the air like spring-loaded shitkickers. Old hat, new hat, old hat—their loyalty had returned.

We rolled around the asphalt for a while, banging into cars and shopping carts.

After the gunfight, only two pigs remained. I considered scalping them for a reduced price. The sadness in their eyes was too human, though, and I could barely hear their always-fidgeting teeth anymore.

“What will you do now?” Nancy asked over dinner. “You’re out of clockseeds.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I just can’t find the rest. I’ll go back to the Meat Orchard tomorrow.”

“Don’t start with that again.”

“Start with what? I’m not starting with anything.”

Nancy’s breast fell off. Then an ear.

“You keep saying ‘pig season’ like it’s a calendar date,” she said, voice thin as a razor. “Like some mayor sent out a proclamation.”

“Maybe someone did. Maybe the mayor’s a sow.”

“You’re being childish.”

I stared at the fallen breast. “I’m being practical. Do you want a better life or do you want a reasonable delusion?”

“Our life is fine. You’re the one who thinks it’s unfine.”

“Nothing’s unfine. We should leave this place.”

“Leave?” She laughed. “When you get an idea in your head, it divorces you from reality.”

“Funny you should use that word.”

She folded her naked arms. “Well, I want a divorce anyhow. A real one.”

Ignoring her, I touched the fallen ear. “They think of me as a shepherd.”

“They…They. You talk about them like you didn’t grow them.”

“I grew them. So?”

Nancy rearranged her lips. “I hate being reduced to an accessory in your myths.”

“You’re not an accessory,” I lied.

“I’m tired of being a prop in your kitchen theater.”

“You’re not a prop,” I lied.

“Don’t tell me what I’m not!” she said. “And don’t mention pig season again.” Slowly, she raised a tremulous hand to her chest and clutched the bloodless wound where her breast used to be.

I stitched the ear back into place. Fixing the breast surpassed my expertise, although it turned out to be a moot point: we forgot what happened without incident. And when we made love, I rooted like a sermon in the mud.

In the middle of the night, I awoke and couldn’t get back to sleep. I had forgotten to feed the pigs. I went outside to check on them. One was male, the other female. I wondered if they might be doing anything forbidden.

I found them in the garden. Glossy and steaming, they had fused into a grotesque mass of indistinguishable flesh and cartilage. It hovered three feet above ground and looked like a tumor that the earth had spat out and gripped in an invisible hand for all to witness in tableau form. A slow, pink mist seeped from the artifact’s many wounds, and the air thickened with the scent of stale milk and burnt oil.

I stood there a while—forever, maybe—waiting for the pig-thing to come apart.