Dora folded each item as if preparing formal napkins for a holiday feast. Careful folds, corners congregating. The problem was that underwear, onesies, and her husband's collars lacked a certain angularity; the dainty motion of her veined hands was the only thing fancy about her heap of laundry.

Winter was weeks away, but the air was already crisp and the grass beneath her feet crunchy from the frozen morning mist. Dora swayed against the cold as she placed another pair of tiny underwear on the paint-peeled picnic table. The backyard was hardly suitable for her task, but Dora had migrated outdoors to escape the smell of charred meat; the chimney of her tired farmhouse was churning out smoke like an incinerator. Just as a rusty, once-red truck plowed down the country road, a gust of wind burst from above, pushing fumes, dust, and the column of smoke toward Dora. That salty, bacon-like smell pursued her.

Hogs, piglets, sows all materialized before her eyes, rolling in the dirt and their own blood, there in front of her splintered porch. Three years prior, a similar red truck had dumped its live contents onto the property. It was a poor road, with potholes bigger than any pots -except maybe for the witches' cauldrons you heard about in fairytales- and one of those holes had caused the premature slaughter.  Oh how the little beasties had squealed and writhed. Dora could still hear it, and not the way you hear a memory, bored deep inside your head, but all around, as real as the cold, as real as that relentless gristly scent, as real as the soft cotton diapers beneath her fingers.

It was the other one, baby Daisy, screaming from inside the house. Nobody had told Dora they would sound like piglets and smell much the same. When the twins were born, Henry said they looked like angels, but if they were angels, then he should have taken them with him when he left every morning to do God's work. With a trembling hand, Dora placed yet another clean diaper atop the pile. Her own leaning tower of Pisa.

Lourelene, born first and blessed with a mouthy name, had the snub nose and pink cheeks to match her hungry squeal. Dora hadn't meant to shake her daughter so; she had seemed as solid as the one piglet that had survived the truck spill, a true little barrel of physical want. That pig had gone on to win prizes at the fair, until it retired to the farmer's plate. Feeeeed me…Feeeeed me... Daisy was taking up the cry now that Lourelene had been silenced. 

Dora paused as if grasping for meaning between the wails. Those silly vegetarians from the city must have got something wrong. We might eat living creatures, but Dora knew they ate us in turn, disguised as cherubs. Her swollen, savaged breasts leaked as Daisy demanded, but Dora continued to fold.

Neighbor Jared walked past with a wheelbarrow full of firewood.

"Good day, Mrs. Mackenney. Smells like quite the roast you have cookin'."

"Oh, this one's burnt to ashes. No good at all. I'll have to throw it out and put in the other."

[Originally published in 2016 at Literary Orphans]