No & Other Love Stories

Piglet

Mireille first caught sight of the man through the window of the butcher’s shop. The various meats hanging there framed him perfectly, standing in his striped apron, wielding his cleaver. She had never desired anyone or anything as much. He was a beast without beauty, a frog enchanted ugly, a boar-bear-pig thing inexplicably wearing the clothes of a man. His hands were rough-cut wedges of ham, his arms beefsteak. All his features were too big: his nose was bulbous, his eyes bulged like a toad’s, his lips were wide and pale like slugs. His visible skin was as red and broken as fresh crackling. His hidden skin, Mireille imagined, was as smooth and white as the fat layered beneath it.

Mireille didn’t know the man’s real name, and later, when she found out, she didn’t care. By then she’d already named him Monsieur Porcine. An invented identity was sometimes better than reality; she knew this from her own life. It had been fine to be a sweet, chubby girl called Mary, but to be a sweet, chubby woman was to be invisible, and that was not fine. So she had become Mireille instead. Mireille was beautiful. To be beautiful, a woman only had to look small and stupid, but not too stupid (there was no such thing as too small). A woman should be small enough that a man can fit his hands around her waist; small enough that she has to stand on her tiptoes to be kissed. But parts of her must be voluptuous; specific parts in isolation from each other. Mireille knew that if someone were to strip her all away, all the parts she’d earned and bought – the lips, the thighs, the hair – she’d be nothing. Not striking, not handsome. Not even ugly. Not remarkable in any way. A pretty-ish female whose looks would soon fade. Utterly worthless.

Through the butcher’s window, Mireille watched as Monsieur Porcine lifted his enormous blade and dropped it with incredible force. The cleaver hit the meat with a thud so huge it shuddered the glass of the window. Mireille felt an answering beat between her legs.

That night, in the blank hours when she’d eaten her supper of leaves (no dressing) but it was too soon to go to bed, Mireille opened her laptop. She couldn’t stop thinking about Monsieur Porcine and his meaty arms. She googled photos of meat, but that wasn’t it. She was hungry for something but didn’t know what – except that wasn’t quite true because the websites she ended up visiting were very specific. She’d have thought a special browser would be needed to access these sorts of websites, but apparently not. Perhaps it was because most of them were text-based; that way a person could argue that it was all merely fiction, and so be free of any sort of prosecution.

Mireille spent hours on the websites. She read a lot of stories, then graduated to pictures. Her favourites were the illustrations (she didn’t like the photographs because it was too apparent that they weren’t her), and she enjoyed one illustration in particular: a woman in a huge cauldron, her ankles and wrists bound together with string like a chicken ready for roasting. Presumably as a nod to seasoning, there were carrots, with the leafy tops still attached, looking very much like Mireille’s own dinner, inserted into the woman’s mouth and vagina. She stared at the drawing for a long time. Then she saved it to her laptop and shut the lid.

It was not that she wanted a carrot in her vagina.

It was that she wanted Monsieur Porcine to put one there.

The next night, despite herself, Mireille found herself visiting the same websites again. Some of the stories Mireille read there began with the getting of the meat: the stalking, the kidnap, the tenderising rape. She skipped those parts. Some of them ended with the actual butchering and eating. She skipped those parts too. She wanted only the prepping and the cooking, the hint of a taste, just to check the flavour. She wanted only the middle, the fatty glorious middle, bound and bulging and bursting, juices dripping, tied and wriggling on a spit, a man watching, his fat hands caressing his own fat belly as his fat tongue licked his fat lips, and the thought of his pink peeping tongue always did it for her, made her imagine his fat pink penis, little mushrooms of his body parts emerging, his lust for her, uncontrolled, beastly, all for her, just for her, and she came so hard she cried out, wordless, animal, as she imagined Monsieur Porcine’s meaty hands all over her body, squeezing, slipping, forcing into anywhere he could make his fat fingers fit.

For the next fortnight she followed her new routine: she walked very slowly past Monsieur Porcine’s shop, then ate her leaves and looked at the websites and came hard. But it was not enough. She wanted the real thing. She wanted meat meat meat. But she didn’t want to eat it; she wanted to be it.

When she began in earnest to seduce Monsieur Porcine, Mireille was surprised at how difficult it was. All men desired her, and he was a man. But perhaps he was more beast than she’d thought. She’d hoped that merely walking into his shop, rather than passing by outside, would be enough to make him drop his cleaver and turn to her instead. But he smiled and greeted her as if she were any other customer. She smiled back, suddenly unsure of herself, and stuttered out an order.

She bought several kinds of meat over several different days before settling on an order of tongue, hoping it would make Monsieur Porcine think of pressing his own fat pink tongue to her soft parts, but he wrapped it in paper and handed it to her with a polite nod. She fed the tongue to stray animals on the way home, to the dogs and cats that convened at her balcony, begging for blood all night. She dreamt of wolves and pigs eating one another, of her tongue growing huge and slipping out of her mouth like a cow’s, of Monsieur Porcine buying her and making her clean him with her big cow’s tongue like they were both cats.

But her favourite dream – which could more accurately be called a fantasy, as it arose in her waking hours, and only followed her into her sleep because she thought about it so much – took place at the butcher’s shop. It was a long and elaborate vision which began with her lying naked on the stainless-steel counter and Monsieur Porcine standing above her. He was silent, appreciative, merely looking. She was cold on the counter and her nipples were as hard as gristle, grown purple in the chilled air. Then, gently, Monsieur Porcine took a pen and marked out her body into different cuts of meat. He sticky-taped little price tags onto the different parts, quantifying the loin and the breast, the flank and the sweetmeats. She could see from the numbers that she was worth a lot. The smaller the quantity of meat, the rarer it was; the more valuable. Finally, Monsieur Porcine placed sprigs of parsley into her mouth and vagina, to show how she might be served, and laid her out in the window display. But the window display did not face out into the street, as they usually did. It faced inwards, so only Monsieur Porcine could see. She was laid out, perfect, precious and priced, ready for him to eat.

Though the seduction took all her skill and much longer than she anticipated, eventually Mireille succeeded, and she and Monsieur Porcine married. When she said her vows she used his real name, but in her head she still called him Monsieur Porcine. They fucked, a lot. She didn’t tell him about the websites or her fantasy. She worked the front counter at the butcher’s shop. Their profits tripled, even on tripe. There was something undeniably appealing about a tiny and beautiful woman handling large quantities of meat. Sometimes she even let herself make a small surprised gasp, mouth red and round like a vintage pin-up, when the string of sausages spilled out of the machine and into her hands. Their sausages weren’t even that good, but they sold a lot of them.

Monsieur Porcine stayed fat and red. Mireille stayed small and beautiful. It was boring and tiring to stay that way, eating leaves and going for long-distance runs every night before bed, but what choice did she have? She had to stay tiny. She couldn’t let herself get big and invisible. And every night when Monsieur Porcine climbed on top of her and slid his meaty parts inside her, she knew it was worth it.

One day, Mireille fell ill and took to her bed. Monsieur Porcine brought her a punnet of grapes and a new paperback of a classic novel, the latter being a thing that people always say they’ll read while ill in bed but never do. He cleared away her snotty tissues and brought her the washing-up bowl when she thought she might vomit. Mireille filled the room with her stale exhalations. By the time she was better, her hair was slick with oil, spots bracketed her nose and all the polish had chipped off her nails. That night she reached for Monsieur Porcine, and he came to her and kissed her on the mouth, although she hadn’t brushed her teeth for two days. She came hard, as she always did with Monsieur Porcine, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning, Mireille sat up in bed and realised a terrible thing. It was so terrible that she felt dizzy and had to lie down again. Last night she had been disgusting with sickness. But was Monsieur Porcine disgusted? No, he was not. Monsieur Porcine did not desire her because she was small and perfect and beautiful. He did not even merely desire her. He loved her.

Mireille did not know if she loved Monsieur Porcine. But she did want to fuck him, now and always. He was the most alluring creature she had ever seen. But if he was more beast than man, and also alluring, then could the same be true – Mireille was so horrified by this question that now she slid off her bed and lay on the floor – could it be true for her?

It was fine for a man to be a beast: a butcher, an ogre, a thing of meat and lust with fur and fangs and claws, a huge and muscled enemy commander who women ran from, shrieking, but then went home and wrote romance novels about. But men did not write novels about she-beasts. And if they did, the beasts were still tiny and had tits. She did not see how she could take him as he took her.

The years passed, and Mireille and Monsieur Porcine still fucked a lot. She didn’t visit the websites again, though she did think about them regularly. She found that her butcher fantasy was creeping back into her life; but this time, instead of imagining herself as the meat, she was the butcher. A few times, while thinking about it at the shop, she managed to bring herself to orgasm while standing at the counter, thighs squeezing and buttocks pulsing, occasionally twisting her body in a way that made the fabric of her bra pull pleasingly on her nipples. She stayed silent when she came, and kept smiling and serving customers, and she didn’t mess up a single order.

Monsieur Porcine did mess up the orders. He had something on his mind. He loved the way that he and Mireille fucked, but for him something was, perhaps, a little lacking. No, that was too strong a sentiment; Mireille was complete, but Monsieur Porcine felt the lack in himself.

Before marrying, Monsieur Porcine had run the shop himself. He’d lifted his cleaver high with his powerful arm and thudded it down much harder than necessary, just to show he could. He’d smiled at customers, passed the time of day, allowed them to see how the impressive bulk of him filled the space behind the counter. He’d been on full display at all times, framed by the meat in the window in a way that was not accidental. Monsieur Porcine, after all, had arranged the meat himself.

But now, all anyone saw was Mireille. He could pick her up with his pinkie, and yet she blocked him from view entirely. He did not want to be without Mireille, but sometimes he felt that she was consuming him.

Mireille, as it turned out, really did love Monsieur Porcine. She’d have loved him even if he suddenly became tiny and beautiful. She knew this because when he told her how he felt, her first response was not disgust, which was what she’d expected she’d feel if Monsieur Porcine ever showed her any weakness. Instead she felt sadness, and regret, and a rush of tenderness and panic that she could only describe as love.

That night, after the shop had closed for business, Mireille wrapped herself in Monsieur Porcine’s apron. He was much too large to lie up on the counter, so she scrubbed the floor clean enough to eat your dinner off, and he lay there instead. Mireille was silent, appreciative, merely looking. She saw him without his clothes on every night, but this felt different: he was pure meat, pure spectacle. He was for looking at, for salivating over, for making designs on.

She took a pen and marked out his body into different cuts of meat. She sticky-taped on the price tags. She placed sprigs of parsley on his nipples and testicles.

Standing there, looking down at her husband, she felt something under her apron. A pressing, an insistent growth. She knew without looking what it was: a pig tail, pretty and pink, thrusting out from the cleaving of her buttocks.

Later she would lay Monsieur Porcine out just like this in their bed, climb on top, and show him.