The Third Pig & Sleeps With the Fishes

By Kater Cheek

"The Third Pig"
Johannes Schwein never trusted that wolf from the day he sauntered into town, but his brothers insisted that Conn would never hurt anyone.
First one brother, then the other, has his house blown in. Conn swears he’s innocent, and hints at a dark secret from his past. Johannes knows he must uncover the truth behind his littermates’ disappearance before he himself gets turned into bacon.

"Sleeps With the Fishes."
What do you do when the chick you’re shagging suddenly turns into a mermaid? Get her to water! With the help of a beer bong, a flatbed truck, two plastic garbage cans, a useless RA, a bike pump, and a Taiwanese flag corp team, the dorm residents struggle to get Ashlee the mermaid to the ocean before she suffocates.

Also includes a sample chapter from Mulberry Wands, sequel to Alternate Susan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kater Cheek
• Release date: Apr 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310315374

Book preview

The Third Pig

&

Sleeps With the Fishes

&

MULBERRY WANDS

(sample chapter)

By Kater Cheek

The Third Pig

Sleeps With the Fishes

MULBERRY WANDS

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Kater Cheek

9781310315374

The Third Pig

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six-Epilogue

Sleeps With the Fishes

MULBERRY WANDS sample chapter

End

The Third Pig

By Kater Cheek

Part One

I curse the day they invented bacon. Is it our fault we are so delicious? Aloysius asked, over a glass of Riesling. He wore a velvet coat with a single button made out of a copper coin. His short pants had been embroidered with edelweiss flowers, and his cap had a tiny blue feather, which, he would explain with a wink, a little bird gave me.

My house is nowhere near finished. I haven’t picked out paint colors, ordered the windows, even looked at the kitchen specs. Why, I haven’t even gotten my swatches back from the decorator—

Or laid a foundation, I added.

—so the last thing I need to worry about is some wolf prowling around. Aloysius added more sticks to the brazier and shivered theatrically. Aloysius did everything theatrically.

Our late mother—bless her curly pink tail—had bequeathed us a few acres of land on the edge of a forest, and bade us to build homes there. I’d already staked out a spot, but a late blizzard covered my future house foundation, so that only the tips of red ribbons peeked through the snow. It was going to set construction back three weeks, and my trotters were frozen from scooping mud out of the riverbank all day for bricks. The tent we’d been living in wouldn’t provide much protection from wolves. A wolf could practically knock this tent down just by blowing on it.

Wolves are just misunderstood, Fritz said. He’d found some sowthistle and was busily packing a pipe with it. Fritz believed it was unnatural for pigs to be clean, so he never bathed, and wore lots of patchouli oil. Even without the pipe smoke, sharing a tent with Fritz made my eyes water. Let’s not be bigoted. After all, you don’t like it when people think pigs are lazy, do you?

Well, let me tell you about my amazing idea. Al said, breathlessly, standing between us. He set his wineglass down so he could gesture with his hooves. I went for a walk yesterday and I found this huge bundle of sticks some woodcutter left. I’m going to make a frame of the logs, and then I’m going to use the sticks between them, and slap a mixture of mud, clay, and plaster to fill in the gaps. I’m going to patent it, and call it Aloysius Schwein’s amazing two part harmonious construction technique’.

It’s called wattle-and-daub, Al, I said. It’s been around for hundreds of years.

Well, Aloysius huffed. If they haven’t patented it, then I will.

How about you, Fritz? I asked, slapping more mud and straw into a brick form. My trotters were caked in reddish mud, and I longed for a glass of Al’s Riesling (or better yet, some of that pilsner I was saving to celebrate with, once I laid my foundation) but bricks took a lot longer than Al’s wattle-and-daub, and probably longer than whatever Fritz was going to make.

Straw-bale house, Fritz said proudly. It’s the latest in sustainable living. Sturdy, eco friendly, and with an R factor that puts wooden structures to shame.

A house made of straw? I grunted. Ridiculous.

It will be great, he said, folding his forelegs and turning away.

Just two days later, a warm spell came though. The snow vanished, and the mud unfroze, so I got to work grubbing and digging the mud of my foundation. Laying the foundation is the most important part of building, and it’s also the most fun. At the end of the day, I was usually covered from head to tail in mud.

We’d originally planned our homesites to be right next to each other, but Al and Fritz both decided to move. Fritz wanted a better location so that he had room for his compost heap and organic garden, and Al had chosen his home site on the side of a picturesque hill, but when the temperature warmed, the meltwater washed away what would have been his living room. He was so disgruntled by all his lost work that he crawled into his sleeping bag with a flask of amaretto, and it took a full body masque to gruntle him again.

When the wolf came, our homes were still unfinished.

Fritz’s was the closest to done, with four straw-bale walls and a tarp where the roof should be. Aloysius had his framed in and half built, and mine had a foundation and one wall, but I’d underestimated how long it would take to make all these bricks. (Every pig’s project ran over budget and past the deadline—it’s a curse of our species.)

I saw the wolf come down from the woods while I