God of Pigs

     All day gunfire rang throughout the cabin, the clearing, and the surrounding woods. Fargo hid in her room, and once her father and uncle got too drunk and the gunshots seemed inescapable, she hid in her bed. She turned off the lights so that the only shine came from the milky moon hanging heavy beyond her bedroom window. Late into the night the men’s hollers, the incessant unloading and reloading, sang her to sleep.
     She awoke early, when the sun was but a red dome on the eastern skyline. She tiptoed through the cabin, over the drunken bodies of her father and her uncle, and outside to the edge of the forest. There she gazed out into the dark thicket and sneaked over the border, around root and thorn and bracken, into the depths where she knew she did not belong. The leaves glistened like green and gold birds, rustling and nesting in the safety of the highest parts of the forest, their shimmer in the gentle wind ensnaring her young mind as the morning sprawled into full glory. One fell and fluttered softly towards the ground, landing at her feet. She picked it up and clung onto it tightly. It was then, under the spell of the wild, that she met the boar.
      The movement of the beast broke the daydream, and standing proud before the brush with brown fur and a strong body, with brown eyes, pig-faced, it regarded her. It blinked and with a rustle of its fur, the way a dog might shake when wet, the boar shook free many hidden eyes from its wiry undercoat. They peered in every direction, lacing the creature like jewels inlaid in fine armor. When it next blinked, a thousand times over, the surrounding forest shuddered in tandem. 
     “Are you the source of the thunder?” the boar asked.
     She shook her head. 
     It approached and circled around. She stood frozen, eyeballing the large tusks jutting from its jaw. It watched her and it watched everything else, eyes skittering underneath the fur like insects. Then the boar spoke again. “Of course not. You are young. I would ask you why you came here, but I already know the answer.” 
     She took a small step backwards as its coarse hair brushed against the soft of her arm. Gooseflesh raced up her neck.
   “You come in search of excitement, of danger. But soon that will not be enough. Soon you will grow and tire of the search. You will become what you seek—incite the chaos which you so desperately crave. An oyster in search of a pearl, not yet realizing it a treasure born of itself.” 
     As it spoke these last words, gunfire sounded from the cabin. Still Fargo stood like stone. The boar blinked again while bullets flew, breaking the air and hitting branches and leaves and nothing. Like hailfall, oakbark rained onto the girl and the boar and the forest floor. Little birds reduced to splinters and shrapnel. A bullet whizzed past her face and beyond, grazing the boar and burying itself into the dark soil. Blood poured from the wound and the beast’s countless eyes snapped shut. Squealing, feral, it kicked at the dirt beneath its hooves and charged and gored the child against the sturdy backstop of an ancient oak. 
   Fargo bled, and the world with all its green and gold, the sunshine leaking through the canopy, blackened.