The Little Green Pig

The Little Green Pig

By Katurian Katurian

Once upon a time…. A long long way away there was a little green pig. Now the little pig, he really liked being green. Not that he didn't like the colour of normal pigs, he thought pink was nice too, but what he liked was, he liked being a little bit different, a little peculiar. The other pigs around him didn't like him being green though. They were jealous and they bullied him and made his life a misery. And all this complaining just aggravated the farmers.

So they thought “Hmm, we’d better do something about this.” So one night, as all the pigs lay sleeping in the open fields, they crept out and snatched the little green pig and brought him back to the barn, and the little pig was squealing and all the other pigs were just laughing at him. And when the farmers got him to the barn, what they did was they opened up  this big pot of this very special pink paint and they dunked him in it till he was covered from head to foot and not a patch of green was left, and they held him down until it dried. And what was special about the pink paint was it could never be washed off and it could never be painted over. And the little green pig said – “Oh please God, please don’t let them make me like all the rest. I'm happy in being a little big peculiar.

But it was too late, the paint was dry, and the farmers sent him back out into the fields, and all the pink pigs laughed at him as he passed and sat down on his favourite little patch of grass, and he tried to understand why God hadn't listened to his prayers, but he couldn't understand, and he cried himself to sleep and even all the thousand tears he cried couldn't help wash off the horrible pink paint because it could never be washed off and never painted over. And he went to sleep.

But that night, as all the pigs in the field lay a-sleeping, these strange, strange storm clouds began to gather overhead and it began to rain, slowly at first but getting heavier. But this was no ordinary rain, this was a very special green rain, almost as thick as paint and not only that, there was something else special about this paint. It could never be washed off and it could never be painted over. And when morning came and the rain had stopped and all the pigs awoke, they found that every single one of them had turned bright green, every single one except, of course, the old little green pig, who was now the little pink pig, upon whom the strange rain had washed straight off because of the unpaintoverable paint the farmers had covered him in earlier. “Unpaintoverable.” And as he looked at the strange sea of green pigs that lay around him, most of which were crying like babies, he smiled, and he thanked goodness, and he thanked God, because he knew that he was still, and he always would be, just a little bit peculiar 

The Tale of the Town on the River

The Tale of the Town on the River

By Katurian Katurian

Once  upon a time in a tiny cobble-streeted town on the banks of a fast flowing river, there lived a little boy who did not get along with the other children of the town; they picked on and bullied him because he was poor and his parents were drunkards and his clothes were rags  and he walked around barefoot. The little boy, however, was of a happy and dreamy disposition, and he did not mind the taunts and the beatings and the unending solitude. He knew that he was kind-hearted and full of love and that someday someone somewhere would see this love inside him and repay him in kind.

Then, one night, as he sat nursing his newest bruises at the foot of a wooden bridge that crossed the river and led out of town, he heard the approach of a horse and cart along the dark, cobble street, and as it neared he saw that it’s driver was dressed in the darkest of robes, the black hood of which bathed his craggy face in shadow and sent a shiver of fear through the little boy’s body. Putting his fear aside, the boy took out a small sandwich that was to be his supper that night and, just as the cart was about to pass onto and over the bridge, he offered it up to the hooded driver to see if he would like some.

The car stopped, the driver nodded, got down and sat beside the little boy for a while, sharing the sandwich and discussing this and that. The driver asked the boy why he was barefoot and raged and all alone, and as the boy told the driver of his poor, hard life, he eyed the back of the drivers cart; it was piled high with small, empty animal cages, all foul smelling and dirt-lined, and just as the boy was about to ask what kind of animals it was had been inside them, the driver stood up and announced that he had to be on his way.

“But before I go” the driver whispered, “because you have been so kindly to an old traveller in offering half of your already meagre portions, I would like to give you something now, the worth of which today you may not realise, but one day, when you are a little older, Perhaps, I think you will truly value and thank me for. Now close your eyes.” And so the little boy did what he was told and closed his eyes, and from a secret inner pocket of his robes  the driver pulled out a long, sharp and shiny meat clever, raised it high in the air and brought it scything down onto the boy’s right foot, severing all five of his muddy little toes.

And as the little boy sat there in gaping silent shock, staring blankly off into the distance at nothing in particular, the driver gathered up his bloody toes, tossed them away to the gaggle of rats that had begun to gather in the gutter, got back onto his cart, and quietly rode on over the bridge leaving the boy, the rats, the river and the darkening town of Hamelin far behind him.

The Little Jesus Story

The Little Jesus Story

By Katurian Katurian

Once upon a time in a land not so very far away there lived a little girl, and, although this little girl’s gentle parents hadn't brought her up very religiously at all, she was quite quite determined that she was the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Which was somewhat strange for any six-year old. She’d wear a little beard and would go around in sandals, blessing stuff. She could be forever found walking amongst the poor and the homeless, consoling the drunks and the drug addicts, and generally consorting with the type of person her mummy and daddy didn't deem suitable for a six-year-old to be consorting with. Each time they would drag her home from some unsavoury sort she would stamp and scream and throw her dollies about, and when her parents would counter that “Jesus never stamped and screamed and threw his dollies about” She’d reply, “That was the old Jesus! Get it?”

Well, one day, the little girl slipped away yet again, and for two horrifying days her parents could find neither hide nor hair of her, until they received a distraught call from a priest they didn't know, saying, “You’d better come down to the church. Your daughter’s here giving us a lot of shit. It was cute at first but now it’s really getting irritating.”

Well, her parents didn't care about all that, they were just relieved that she was alive and well, and they sped downtown to pick her up, but in their haste they careened into an oncoming meat truck, were beheaded and died. The little girl was informed of the news; she cried one single tear, and not a single tear more, as she thought Jesus would've done if he’d lost his parents in a vehicular beheading; and she was shipped off by the state to live in a forest with some abusive foster-parent who hadn't informed the state that they were abusive in the form; who hated religion, who hated Jesus, who hated anybody, in fact, who didn't hate anybody, and who, as would follow, hated the little girl.

She bore their hate with a happy heart and forgave them, but this didn't seem to work. When she insisted on attending church of a Sunday, they took her sandals away, forcing her to walk there barefoot and alone, over craggy roads of broken glass, yet when she got there she’d kneel for hours, praying for her Father in Heaven to forgive them, only to get told off for bleeding all over the church. She’d receive a beating for arriving late home, though no time had been set for her arrival; she’d receive a beating for sharing her food with the poor children at school, she’d receive a beating for cheering up the ugly kids, she’d receive a beating for wandering about looking for lepers. Her life was a constant torture, yet she bore it with a smile and it all only made her stronger, till this one day when she met a blind man begging by the roadside.

She mixed a little of her spittle in the dust and rubbed it over his eyes. He reported her to the police for rubbing dust and spittle in his eyes, and when her foster-parents got her back from the police station they said to her “So you want to be like Jesus, do you?” And she said, “Finally you fucking get it!” And they stared at her a little while. And then it started.

Her foster-mother embedded in her daughter’s head a crown of thorns made of barbed wire, because she was too lazy to make a proper crown of thorns, while her foster-father whipped her with a cat o’ nine tails, and after an hour or two of that, they asked her, when she regained consciousness.

“Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And, through her tears, she said, “Yes, I do.”

So they made her carry a heavy wooden cross around the sitting room a hundred times until her legs buckled and her shins broke and she could do nothing but stare at her little legs going the wrong way, and they said to her

“Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And she almost got sick for a second, but she swallowed it so she wouldn't look weak and she looked them in the eye and she said. “Yes, I do.”

And then they nailed her hands to cross and bent her legs back around the right way and nailed her feet to the cross and they stood the cross up against the back wall and left her there while they watched television, and when all the good programmes were over they turned it off and they sharpened a spear and they said to her “Do you still want to be like Jesus?”

And the little girl swallowed her tears and she took a deep breath and she said, “No. I don’t want to be like Jesus. I fucking am Jesus!” And her parents stuck the spear in her side and they left her there to die, and they went to bed. And in the morning they were quite surprised that she wasn't dead so they took her down off the cross and they buried her alive in a little coffin with just enough air to live for three days and the last voices she heard were her foster-parents above, calling out “Well if you’re Jesus, you’ll rise again in three 

days, won’t you?”

And the little girl thought about it for a while, then she smiled to herself and she whispered, “Exactly. Exactly.” And she waited. And she waited. And she waited.

Three days later a man out walking the woods stumbled over a small, freshly dug grave, but, as the man was quite blind, he carried on by, sadly not hearing a horrible scratching of bone upon wood a little way behind him, that ever so slowly faded away and was lost for ever in the black, black gloom of the empty, empty, empty forest.

The Writer and the Writer's Brother

The Writer and the Writer’s Brother

By Katurian Katurian

Once upon a time there was a little boy upon whom his mother and father showered nothing but love, kindness, warmth, all that stuff. He had his own little room in a big house in the middle of a pretty forest. He wanted for nothing: all the toys in the world were his; all the paints, all the books, paper, pens. All the seeds of creativity were implanted in him from an early age and it was writing that became his first love: short stories, fairy tales, little novels, all happy, colourful things about bears and piglets and angels and so forth, and some of them were good, some of them were very good. His parents’ experiment had worked. The first part of his parents’ experiment had worked.

It was the night of his seventh birthday that the nightmares started. The room next door to his own room had always been kept bolted and padlocked for reasons the boy was never quite sure of but never quite questioned until the low whirring of drills, the scritchety-scratch of bolts being tightened, the dull fizz of unknown things electrical, and the muffled scream of a small gagged child began to emanate through its thick brick walls. On a nightly basis. “What were all those noises last night, Mama?” he’d ask after each long, desperate, sleepless night, to which his mother would ever reply “Oh little Kat, that’s just your wonderful but over-active imagination playing tricks on you.”

 “Oh. Do all little boys of my age hear such sounds of abomination nightly?”

“No, my darling. Only the extraordinarily talented ones.”

“Oh. Cool.”

And that was that. And the boy kept on writing, and his parents kept encouraging him with the utmost love, but the sounds of the whirrs and screams kept going on and his stories got darker and darker and darker. They got better and better, due to all the love and encouragement, as is often the case, but they got darker and darker, due to the constant sound of child-torture, as is also often the case.

It was on the day of his fourteenth birthday, a day he was waiting to hear the results of a story competition he was short-listed for, that a note slipped out from under the door of the locked room. A note which read: ‘They have loved you tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don’t write about little green pigs any more, do you?’ The note was signed ‘Your brother’, and the note was written in blood.

He axed through the door to find his parents sitting in there, smiling, alone; his father doing some drill noises; his mother doing some muffled screams of a gagged child; They had a little pot of pig’s blood between them, and his father told him to look at the other side of the blood-written note. The boy did, and found he’d won the fifty-pounds first prize in the short-story competition. They all laughed. The second part of his parents’ experiment was complete.

They moved house soon after that and though the nightmare sounds had ended, his stories stayed strange and twisted but good, and he was able to thank his parents for the weirdness they’d put him through, and years later, on the day that his first book was published, he decided to revisit his childhood home for the first time since he’d left. He idled around his old bedroom, and all the toys and paints still littered around there. Then he went into the room beside it that still had the old dusty drills and padlocks and electrical cord lying around, and he smiled at the insanity of the very idea of it all, but he lost his smile when he came across the corpse of a fourteen-year-old child that had been left to rot in there, barely a bone of which wasn't broken or burned, in whose hand there lay a story, scrawled in blood. And the boy read that story, a story that could only have been written under the most sickening of circumstances, and it was the sweetest, gentlest thing he’d ever come across, but, what was even worse, it was better than anything he himself had ever written. Or ever would.

So he burnt the story, and he covered his brother back up, and he never mentioned a word of what he had seen to anybody. Not to his parents, not to his publishers, not to anybody. The final part of his parents’ experiment was over.