CREATION MYTH by Scott Broker

Though she had spent a week in that tropical place, partaking in many of the excursions the resort advertised to families like hers, the girl would not remember the snorkeling or the lagoon tour, the zipline through the jungle or the dolphins she had ridden. It did not matter that the dolphins had been as rubbery as she’d hoped, and as gentle, even allowing her to run a finger along their perfect teeth. It did not matter that the palms were as frilly, the sea as guileless. Everything was gone, blotted out by the drainage tunnel and what she found there. Whatever happens to the erased word—that is what those tender times suffered.

Beachside, the girl’s parents were lamenting the injustices of geography. Couldn’t the world have spread its wonders more evenly? It was their final day of vacation. Since leaving, Ohio had become increasingly featureless to them all; today, on the cusp of their return, the girl thought of her home state and summoned to mind nothing beyond a slab of gray shale. It was unjust, and hearing her parents go on was depressing her. She turned away, shimmying her feet until the sand swallowed them, a method she’d learned from the crabs. 

A hundred yards away, a pig was seated in the sand. Like the girl and her family, it sat beneath a large umbrella, and while its presence was no great shock—they had seen several pigs peaceably roaming the hotel grounds—the way it looked at her was. The pig’s gaze was not menacing, but beseeching, as if it had been waiting for her to turn its way for some time. 

The girl glanced away and glanced back. This time, she thought the pig might have tears in its eyes. 

“I’ll be back,” she said, standing.

“My top might be off,” her mom said. “Don’t freak.”

“Mine, too,” her dad added, smacking his bare belly. 

The girl did not turn back. She stared at the pig and the pig stared at her. The smell of the sea made her nose run. As she crossed the divide between them, she had the sense that her parents might be gone if she looked over her shoulder. 

The pig was pink with tufts of white fur sprouting from its body. Each of its ears had been pierced with three gold hoops. It was not crying.

“Hello, hog,” the girl said, unsure of where else to begin.

The pig snorted as it lifted its haunches from the towel. The girl started when it bit onto the hem of her skirt, tugging her forward. Then the pig let go, turned, and began to trot away. With a certainty she rarely encountered, the girl understood that she was to follow. In the pig’s smelly wake, the surrounding world grew confused with itself. Had they just dodged a surfboard, or a lifeguard? Was that static sound coming from a radio, or the sea? The answers to these questions were unclear. Clear was the pig. Clear were her steps in its hoofprints. 

The girl did not realize they’d left the sand for cement until she felt a sharp pain between her toes. The pig stopped when she stopped, though it did not turn back to watch her pick the glass shard from her skin. She understood this to be a gesture of respect. 

The sight of blood refocused her. Now she saw that they were miles from the resort, beneath an overpass that connected the coastline to another island. Garbage was strewn about the concrete expanse. Cars motored overhead. The glass, she saw, had come from a broken beer bottle, the same brand her parents had been enjoying all week. 

The temptation to turn back swelled inside her. It was not the first time she’d felt overwhelmed by her own youth, daunted by whatever realm of adulthood into which she’d foolishly dropped herself. Yet when the pig continued, she continued, too, mindful of where she placed her feet. They crossed from sunlight into shade. Standing beneath the overpass, a chilly calm overtook her. To her left, the sea lapped; to her right, the mouth of a drainage tunnel gaped, a trickle of water and a current of damp air flowing from its interior. 

Looking back, she could not say how deep into the tunnel they went, though other details were always a blink away—the scent; the slick seepage underfoot; the dimness. Then there was the boy, the sharpest detail of all, that great eraser of joy. He was what she remembered. How he had been sitting alone in the sludge, naked and pale and hairless. How he did not open his eyes. How his ears, like the pig’s, were thrice-pierced. How his legs were crossed daintily at the ankle. And how his voice had been so like a frog’s, all croak and mourning. 

“Tell them I’m sorry,” he said, petting the pig’s flank.

“Who?” she asked, ashamed of her voice, its vitality.

The boy shuddered. “I didn’t know it would be so bad.”

Her memory stopped abruptly there, then restarted at her parents’ towel. Her mother was topless. Her father said she smelled of dog. She tried but couldn’t manage to speak of the boy—could never speak of him, in fact, despite his charge. All she could do was beg for a drink, for an awful thirst had stricken her. Her father handed her a cracked coconut. Expecting water, she gagged on melted daquiri, warm with the sun.

Where was the pig? She would remember it. The pig, the boy, the tunnel. This, as well: the putrid drink, the tickle of the coconut’s fibers on her cheeks, and the knowledge, finally, that it was all profane—creation—and worthy only of being spat back upon itself.

Scott Broker is a queer writer based in Los Angeles. A Tin House Scholar, Lambda Literary Fellow, and graduate of Ohio State University's MFA Program, he has been a finalist for the Iowa Review's Prize in Fiction, the New England Review's Emerging Writer Award, and a nominee for three Pushcart Prizes. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the New England Review, Ecotone, Fence, Joyland, the Idaho Review, and Catapult, among others. He can be found at www.scottjbroker.com.