The Sunday Scaries
Volume I, Number 47
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

The Pig-god

The pig-god was once a little baby. The pig-god was born to a girl in what is now Central Asia, in the year 1200 BCE. The pig-god grew to manhood and slew his father so that he might command the tribe. The pig-god demanded tribute, and took it from the crafted bronzeworks of his own tribe and the cleaned and ornamented bones of the tribes he killed. The pig-god, when the hour came, was tended to and opened and perfumed, bedecked with ornament and dressed in freshly woven robes, and the pig-god’s organs were extracted and sealed in sacred jars: the sex, the stomach, the bowels and brain, the lungs and liver and kidneys, the heart and each eye: and those jars were buried separately removed in holy places, and the emptied body of the pig-god was laid secretly in earth, and the priests who had done this walked a day and a night away from one another, changing their direction every hour, and when the hour of the burial had come again they slit their throats and died a great distance apart and in no particular pattern, so that no one might later muse upon it and deduce the location of the grave of the great pig-god.
          The pig-god slept. The pig-god dreamed pig dreams.
          The pig-dog woke. The pig-dog greeted his followers, who one by one and helping one another when the need arose, gave unto him their eyes, and hearts, and livers and kidneys and lungs, and brains and bowels, and stomachs and sexes, which the pig-god accepted into his magnanimous body. The pig-god stood, to the wonderment of the survivors. The pig-god took their bones.
          The pig-god strode once more into this new, metal-smelling world.

💀

Vol. 1, Nos. 1 – 13
Vol. 1, Nos. 14 – 26
Vol. 1, No. 27 – 39
Vol. 1, No. 40 – Drop By Any Time
Vol. 1, No. 41 – The Red-eye
Vol. 1, No. 42 – Separations
Vol. 1, No. 43 – Every Day is Halloween
Vol. 1, No. 44 – Transcript: Disc 1684, A and B, June 13(?), 1938
Vol. 1, No. 45 – Odd Girl Out
Vol. 1, No. 46 – The Sunday Funnies
Vol. 1, No. 47 – The Pig-god
Vol. 1, No. 48 – Machines of Loving Grace
Vol. 1, No. 49 – The Valley of Dry Bones

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, Gameplaywright, and ETC Press. In darkened unpopulated Twin Cities theaters he sometimes takes the stage to inflict his horrifying words on the mice and spiders and hostages.
Get your own copies of Pat's work here!

×

EXPLORE