There/There

ARG & AEG

When I find the pig, he is drowning. Buried in snow, suffocating, his throat stiff, eyelids frostbitten, waxen and pale.

I gather my arms around his neck, pull him to my chest, drag his fleshy mass across ice.

The split logs burn and shift. The wood stove warms the skin.

My fingers press into his softness like clay. I imagine pink. But when I flip him over, purple organ meat protrudes from his belly— spilling slippery and fresh.

Should I call someone? And what would I say? I am trying to thaw a frozen pig back to life? 

There’s a stir, a tightening cramp, a jolt. Is this what happens when a pig comes back to life or is it what happens when it dies?

I lift his ear flap. It smells of thick rot. I panic and close it like a pocket with my palm.

The doctor told me to exhale my viper mind, inhale my swamp mind. I close my eyes. Focus on the flare of the nostrils. I can smell it still and despite my attempt at calm, hundreds of thought fish swarm my mind. 

Say the thing. Say it. I lean my forehead against his side. My hands caress from his cold flanks to his back hooves. Perhaps I can lull his body to life by locating him in the order of things. 

“Ok,” I say. I clear my phlegm. I start slow, grovely. 

“Let us bless the hominids, the homo erectus, the homo sapiens, the homo sapiens sapiens. The wooly beasts, the wild boars, the lizard creatures, the flying ones.” 

“Let us bless the fish with feet who dared crawl forth, the swimming ones who stayed, the jellyfish, the divided cells in the ocean brine. That first glorious single cell, the amino acids collapsed on themselves, the concentric circles. Let us bless the lightning that electrified the floating bits, the flashing clouds, the water sky, the silent whipping fire.”

“God bless the whole wide fucking world!” I spread my arms. The pig thumps to the floor.  

It’s a stunning performance. And yet, no magic happened. We are still a frozen pig, a broken man, and a dwindling fire. My chant is for naught. What the hell was I thinking? 

What they say I am is true. Ruined in mind. Unshaven. Filthy. Hopeless. Homeless. Useless. Gone. Schizo cross-eyes. 

At least I’m sane enough to drag him out.

“Let me be,” I say to nobody. I lift my chin as I haul. The lightest flakes —  geometric cold beauties fall and rest on my eyelashes, millions of them flying and they are soft insects. 

I kneel and roll him under the backside of the barn. I taste wood, ice. I smell frozen dust. 

“There, there,” I say. I pant. My trunk legs barely made the long trek from cabin to barn. My lungs burn. 

I groan a strenuous push with my boots as a woman must when she strains her bloody depths to give life. Only this is death and I kick him fully under the clapboards.

I low crawl through wet leaves. The remnants of barbed fence tear at my cheeks and chest. When I lay my body upon his, I smeared him the blood of me.

Nose to snout, I hoist a leg across his stiff carcass, touch his forehead head delicately with my fingertips. We have the same thin lips.

I’m laugh shivering through cold teeth. It blizzards until there is no more light. I hold onto him now. With strength. He is my boat, my solid raft, my inner tube. I kick frantically. The wind whistles through wood and branches.

“We float,” I say, through frantic breath. 

I pull his rotting ear open.”Just wait.” I say, “soon enough the buds will sprout. The pond will warm and the maggots will multiply and slither through us. Our flesh will melt into each other's. Ok?”

“But,”My breath slower now.”Nobody will save us. There will not be warm food and wine.”

I rest my cheek on his. 

“No candles or incense or smoke. Do you understand?” I say. 

“In the order of things, we will be gone.”

There/There, prose

Interview with ARG by C. VanWinkle
April 27, 2024

What was the prompt that you responded to?

It was an image of a person wearing what looks like a papier-mâché mask of a pig. I can't remember if they were holding it or if it was just on them. The person wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the mask seemed handmade. And there was some text below, something about “the last time we saw each other.”

You and your daughter Annika worked together to respond to this piece. Did you initially look at it together?

I looked at it first and then I showed her not too long after.

Did you have similar reactions to it?

No. For me, the word that immediately came to mind was ‘hiding.’ For her, the words that she wanted to connect to her piece were ‘imagination,’ ‘controlled,’ ‘performance,’ ‘regulated,’ and ‘chaos.’ Her interpretation morphed into a show, a chaotic performance. I didn’t ask her about all the connections between those words and her piece. She just seemed to kind of roll with that.

I see. Is that how you two got started? With her piece?

The order of what was created was: my collage, a conversation about my collage, the beginning of my writing, then she created her collage while I was writing, we talked about I’d written and she gave me some ideas for it, then I finished writing and I read it to her, and then I revised it. So it was really like a back-and-forth. It really was nonlinear.

Can you tell me about how you explored this experience together? What was the conversation like?

Anni is 16. Her first reaction to the prompt was very brief and sort of fleeting. I wanted to sit down and have a longer conversation and she was already in the kitchen. [laughs] Like I said, her initial reactions were about performance, but I pursued a conversation with her a little bit later through showing her my collage. It wasn't finished and it had all these moving parts because nothing was glued down. She moved some of the parts on her own because it was a work in progress and anybody who walked by could move it.

What she wondered was how my collage was related to the pig mask. Because I’ve studied expressive arts, I was able to tell her that I wasn’t intellectually thinking about my response; instead I was letting myself spontaneously, emotionally be really free with it. And she knows about expressive arts. I asked her, “What do you think? Are there any connections in there for you?” She was focused on the word ‘chaos,’ and she said, “This looks totally chaotic, Mom. It looks cool but it makes no sense.”

But she really liked the jellyfish. And she liked the eyes. I hadn’t totally committed to the idea of those circular shapes as eyes, but for her it was really obvious. They had an anthropomorphic quality. I think the theme of the conversation at that point, at least for me, was “What is art?” We wanted to know: What is it? What does it mean? Is it just expressive? What does that mean? And what about different people having different interpretations? We agreed that these different interpretations are what make art compelling.

Oh sure. And the real twist is that all of those interpretations are correct.

Right! I guess we experienced that when we looked at the pig for the first time. We had such different reactions to it. We really enjoyed discussing the idea of multiple interpretations and the nonlinear way that you can produce and be inspired by something.

Something that I found striking about this combination of pieces is that the two collages, particularly yours, feature mostly mild imagery, but the written piece is much more visceral and kind of gruesome. It’s interesting that they go together.

That might be a byproduct of my being a writer first and not as much a visual artist. I have no training in art other than expressive art, which is just, you know, circles. [laughs] So it might be that there is a layer of complexity in the writing that's not shown in the visual. Not having any training in it made it kind of fun to sit down and create something. Maybe less compelling but more organic! I didn’t really have any expectations of how good it would be.

Oh that’s a great attitude. A lot of people come to this project and do things that are outside of their usual practice, or outside of their comfort zone. The stakes are low, so people feel free to experiment and get weird. How does this piece of writing relate to the other things you’ve written?

Oh, that's such an interesting question. I tend to like my pieces that have a feeling of desperation. I think I'm good at it. I've written a lot; I've published some, but I've taken writing classes every week for years. And I always think my best pieces have to do with this fast-paced desperation and this attention to sensory visual detail. This was the first time I had written from the perspective of a man, so that was kind of interesting.

Oh right on.

I wrote medical narratives for a long time, and I think this piece has an element that's related to medical narratives in a way. There's something really physical about the body of the pig and the body of the man. A lot of my medical narrative work was in the rare disease space, so there ended up being a lot of physicality involved in that writing. And my fiction work tends to be pretty raw and pretty emotional. So I guess it is related to some of my writing, even though I didn't actually think about that.

That’s cool. Had you and Anni collaborated before? Do you work together on things sometimes?

We did for her bat mitzvah. She had kind of a creative bat mitzvah and so we collaborated on a booklet that had words and images sort of collaged together. And we collaborate on cooking. We don't like to follow recipes, so we are constantly innovating together and creating dinners that we've invented. She's actually a lot better at it than I am, but we do enjoy collaborating in that way too.

Do you think you will create more together in the future?

I think we will. It's summer, so we're going to have more time together. And we really enjoyed this process. I think that she’s actually going to be interested in writing, based on her watching my process.

It was interesting that the work I did was very slow, and with Anni’s focus on chaos, her collage came together very quickly. I don't know if that's an age thing, but I did like how hers came out. I asked her about it and she said it was a chaotic show, like a musical or whatever, and I thought, “Yes, it is! That's totally what it looks like!”

It's chaotic but I find it sort of celebratory. It's not a scary chaos. It looks like a fun chaos.

Yes, totally. She did use words like ‘positive,’ ‘fun’ – yeah, that was definitely part of it.

Now that you’re on this side of our process, what is your advice to a new person getting their prompt today?

My advice would be turn off the inner critic. It may sound cheesy but listen to your inspiration. Have fun and know that you are part of something really special. It's really cool!

I totally agree!

I found that working with your kid in a creative, collaborative manner is really a great way to have conversations that you might not have without that foundation to go off of.

I imagine that some parents and kids would really thrive in a situation like that, and others would have a lot more friction. I see what you mean though about opening up another kind of communication.

I wish I had written down some of our conversations. I'm telling you about them but I'm not remembering everything. We both had all kinds of things to say to each other. So that would be another piece of advice for anyone else doing this. If you’re going to work in collaboration with somebody, it would be interesting to document the conversation.

That’s a great idea!

Call Number: B115VA | B117PP.aeThe

ARG is a writer, teacher, expressive artist, teen life coach, and a mom to two girls ages 21 and 16 and a golden doodle, Roxy. She runs writing groups for girls and lgbtq+ kids and produces an annual literary zine called Book and Cake. She is thrilled to collaborate with Anni for bait/switch because the conversations that the collaboration initiated were illuminating, freeing, and at times hilarious. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children.

AEG is a junior in high school whose creative pursuits range from wood burning to assistant teaching arts in Morelia, Mexico at Hogar Irekani orphanage. She enjoys cooking, lacrosse, babysitting, and hanging with her friends.