Story: 'Pig Story'

(Note: Quirky Muffin now suspended until middle of next week, due to being in a different place entirely!)

I looked at the pig, but the pig wouldn't look at me. I couldn't blame him. Only a few days ago I had been a concert pianist, and now this pig had a better position in the house than I did. Such reverses are typical when a fake medium turns up and declares your pet farm animal to be a reincarnated Egyptian king. If this pig, Horace by name, had once been a Pharaoh then my name wasn't Phileas Clancy Jones, and this wasn't Hartford. An Egyptian pharaoh! Ha! Did that mean that Percy the Rooster had once been Alexander the Great? Was that why he always looked at me funny?

Oh, it had just been a chance mistake. After practicing some Chopin, I quite casually mentioned to the tea lady in the concert hall cantina the alleged former status of my pig, and she went berzerk! Raving about her parrot Ferdinand, and his prodigious feats of memory and love of pyramids, she drove me out onto the street without a clue as to whether she was the insane one or myself. I didn't believe the pig was a Pharaoh, after all, although my cat often seemed suspiciously regal. Cats often do, in a lazy sort of way.

Walking down the street from the concert hall, and not at all inclined to go back and face Doris's wrath, I reached the Square and realised that things were ever so subtly wrong. There hadn't always been a pyramid in one corner, for one thing, and the Sphinx at the former location of Oscar's Fine Olde Cinema certainly looked out of place. Good grief, would my house still be in once piece?! I ran for home, an old farmstead on the outskirts of town, and was delighted to find it still in one piece. 'What about the blasted pig?', I wondered, and went to check. Horace was still in his pen, munching placidly, but was that a sly look in his eye? Some malice? Surely not!

The next day, the conductor came to see me, and politely asked that I cancel my performances that week. Apparently, Doris had begun a stealth campaign against me, smeared my name in the worst possible manner and called down divine vengeance from Osiris at the Sphinx. The Sphinx? I had forgotten the Sphinx in the strange events. Now, my position was untenable, and his best advice was to keep a low profile and tend the farm in the meantime, while the bizarre mysteries surrounding me seemed to multiply endlessly.

Hence, here I am now, tending my farm. This pig, who maybe is the reincarnation of Amenemhat I, who himself was maybe a divine presence here on Earth, keeps on munching and the populace is beginning to turn up and worship him as word has spread. The pig! What does it all mean? Why is the town suddenly Egyptian themed, and why do I get the feeling that rooster knows more than he's letting on? This is what happens when you let psychics meet your livestock. Never again!

Phileas.