Vigil

(woman to pig transformation)

Silently, the transformed gathered together, just outside the legally mandated ‘protected’ area.  After all, it was a serious crime for one of the infected to enter an inhabited area; the violators rounded up and shipped off to God knows where.  Normal people were terrified of mutating into pigs ever since the infection started, and had taken draconian measures to protect themselves.  They had not been nearly so diligent about finding a cure.

So the transformed gather.  Those that can still walk on two legs, at any rate.  They know better than to enter the town, but still, they want the people to remember them.  Remember their plight.  Feel… feel something, at least, for their half-pig brothers and sisters.  A match is struck, and a candle lit.  The fire passes down the row until every boar, sow, and shoat’s candle is lit.  And the pigs hold their nightly, silent vigil in somber solidarity.  

But even with that solidarity, it is a cold and lonely vigil.  Divested of their possessions, clothed only in sackcloth, and segregated from society like a modern day leper’s colony; the pig people have almost nothing to fight back with.  Nothing except the slim hope, flickering every bit as much as the light of their candles, that others will see their plight and care enough to help.

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