⚒️ Slicker Than a Pig in a Duct

⚒️ Slicker Than a Pig in a Duct

by Joel Glover

Ayşe hated to ask for a favour, but there was nothing else for it. Pickles was stuck, and she couldn’t get her out without another pair of hands.

Her geiger counter chattered away like cicada warming up for their morning efforts. She wasn’t worried, and wouldn’t worry until the tempo became more like a drumline tattoo.

She’d overfed her. That was the problem. 

Chihiro’s video message warned her not to have favourites, and she thought the whole idea utterly ridiculous. Now, here she was, trying to pry her favourite glow-in-the-dark pig out of the U-bend in a hydroponic filtration duct, a U-bend she was only stuck in because Ayşe didn’t put her in the rendering tank a month prior. 

Pickles was, unfortunately for both of them, absurdly cute. Some throwback in her breeding meant that one ear stood up like a sail full of wind, whilst the other flopped down the side of her head. She had freckles, meaning her luminescence was slightly speckled. As pigs went, she was clever, which is to say she was smarter than at least twenty percent of the people on Minikoi.

“Poke her!” she called over the com. Laura grunted in response, and Ayşe watched Pickles pull what was, for a pig, a grumpy face and wiggle back against the pole the soy-bean farmer was using to encourage her to leave. In doing so, she got more thoroughly stuck.

“Didn’t work.”

“I noticed.” This whole thing was costing her money. And time. And drawing down on Ayşe’s very limited reserves of patience. “It’ll have to be the other way then, won’t it.”

Ayşe pulled herself into the ducts.

Like Chihiro before her she was slender and slight, which helped with this part of the work as much as it hindered herding her unruly sounder. Pulling herself along the duct was hard on her joints, each tug forward resulted in banging an elbow or knee cap against the metallic pipework. Keeping her finger away from the trigger and the muzzle pointing towards Pickles made it harder still.

“Pickles, last chance.” She had never counted, but she was confident the pig had a vocabulary of at least three hundred words. She doubted ‘last’ or ‘chance’ were on the list, but the sow was capable of interpreting tone. In this way, she was outperforming Ayşe’s last three romantic partners.

The sow looked at her with her all-too-human eyes and grunted dismissively.

Ayşe gritted her teeth and pulled the trigger.

“Ayşe! A bit of warning!” Lucy’s voice echoed around the cylindrical tube. “I am soaked.”

Pickles grumbled at Ayşe.

“Sorry.” She was, and not just for dousing her friend in cleverly rendered lard. The lubricant that coated the pig, and Lucy behind, was half the product that Ayşe could expect to gain from one pig.

Wasted.

“You owe me for this.” Lucy grumbled wetly over the comm. 

“I know, I know.” Ayşe turned her attention to the pig. “Come on, Pickles. Good girl, come out.” Pickles refused. “Fine.”

She roped the sow, settling the lasso around the neck of the pig, toying with no longer being her favourite. 

“Push again, please.” 

Lucy complied, and between the push from the plunger tipped pole wielded by the heavily lubricated farmer and the pull from pig owner, Pickles became unstuck. She slithered towards Ayşe, who recoiled as fast as she could, before falling feet first into the engineering bay dragging Pickles along with her.

“Well, I have a new idiom, at least.” Lucy smiled

“What?”

“Slicker than a pig in a duct. Now, I am going to have a shower, and you are going to buy me a beer. And not one made from amaranth, I want one made of rice.”

Ayşe looked down at Pickles, who was happily snuffling at her feet. 

“I’ll buy you two.”

She and Pickles were going to have a long conversation.