Long Pig
by Helena Pantsis
Man doesn’t segment evenly
like cake, so when my father,
on his deathbed,
insists on being eaten, I’m not sure
who should get the bowel
and who should get the heart.
I move from room to room
touching talismans
making prayers to the ancestors
who’ve been consumed before us.
My father ate his father’s brain;
I ask my dad what I should eat--
the walls a re covered in wounds,
memories captured and framed
and my mother’s face
before the surgery;
we ate the bones she had removed,
tender and biting
like the thin of a chicken.
You eat the flesh first,
my father tells me,
you unravel it like thread from a spool
and shred it like pasta
to be eaten with tomato sauce
and elemental grief.
He smells like tobacco,
it shrinking the thick of his lungs,
and the specks on his arms
look like pieces of swarf
buried deep in the real of him;
he has been eaten his whole life,
torn into parts like a slaughtered cow
and tied to the core of the workshop,
melted down to fit the moulds
to be what is asked of him.
I call him dad, and it is
a sliver of his name.
When I kiss him
I can already taste the salt
from the sweat on his skin,
and the water from my eyes.
I grip the gold around my neck
glowing hot and branding
the flat of my chest,
imagine a grave
in the pit of my stomach.
He will taste like gristle,
greying and sunken
descending into some abyss
and reincarnating
through his successors,
the diners who circle
his muscles around their tongues
and swallow him,
fragmented but whole.
When my father dies
I take a hacksaw
to his bones and
distribute the pieces.
We hold hands and pray,
preparing his body
to be eaten
with wine and sugar.
like cake, so when my father,
on his deathbed,
insists on being eaten, I’m not sure
who should get the bowel
and who should get the heart.
I move from room to room
touching talismans
making prayers to the ancestors
who’ve been consumed before us.
My father ate his father’s brain;
I ask my dad what I should eat--
the walls a re covered in wounds,
memories captured and framed
and my mother’s face
before the surgery;
we ate the bones she had removed,
tender and biting
like the thin of a chicken.
You eat the flesh first,
my father tells me,
you unravel it like thread from a spool
and shred it like pasta
to be eaten with tomato sauce
and elemental grief.
He smells like tobacco,
it shrinking the thick of his lungs,
and the specks on his arms
look like pieces of swarf
buried deep in the real of him;
he has been eaten his whole life,
torn into parts like a slaughtered cow
and tied to the core of the workshop,
melted down to fit the moulds
to be what is asked of him.
I call him dad, and it is
a sliver of his name.
When I kiss him
I can already taste the salt
from the sweat on his skin,
and the water from my eyes.
I grip the gold around my neck
glowing hot and branding
the flat of my chest,
imagine a grave
in the pit of my stomach.
He will taste like gristle,
greying and sunken
descending into some abyss
and reincarnating
through his successors,
the diners who circle
his muscles around their tongues
and swallow him,
fragmented but whole.
When my father dies
I take a hacksaw
to his bones and
distribute the pieces.
We hold hands and pray,
preparing his body
to be eaten
with wine and sugar.
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Helena Pantsis (she/they) is an editor, writer and artist from Naarm, Australia with a fond appreciation for the gritty, the dark, and the experimental. Her works have been published in Overland, Island, Meanjin, and Cordite. More can be found at hlnpnts.com.
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