Excerpt: Current Affairs (working title)

(NC-17 - subject matter -- with apologies to any real pork farmers; I was just exploring the imagery...)

"So, have you ever seriously considered killing someone?" The late-middle aged man wearing the corporal's bars looked at the teenage girl with a raised eyebrow. "I mean you're damned good with that thing on the range, and I've seen you with the holograms, but killing something flesh and blood is entirely different."

Kelly raised one eyebrow and smiled sweetly at Corporal Fenwick. Over the years, he'd grown to know that the smile was generally a bad sign and was the immediate precursor of some sort of wisecrack that, had it come from one of his own girls, would have resulted in grounding for the rest of eternity. He cut the little lady a lot of slack because she was the best natural sshot he'd seen in over a decade, and if she were so inclined, could probably shoot for Olympic gold, but once in a while he had to bite his tongue over the acidity of hers.

"Corporal," the seventeen year old replied, the smile fading from her face, "my grandfather has a working farm. I've been killing other living being since I was holding the chickens over the chopping block when I was about eight years old. According to the vegetarians, they're sentient, and while I would disgree with that sentiment, they're certainly not targets on a range."

Harold looked at her for a moment and sighed. "Kelly, you know I think you're good, but I don't think you realize how hard it's going to be to overcome the fact that you're a woman if you want to be special forces. You'll get through basic okay, but the ovaries are going to be a problem when you start pushing to be a SEAL. They're not going to believe you can take it."

Sighing heavily, Kelly took a deep breath through her nose before formulating her response. There was the faintest hint of whatever cologne the Corporal wore; something grassy and bright-smelling, and most definitely not a scent she found attractive. But it was him, and his wife liked it, so her opinion was somewhat irrelevant. There was the bitter earthiness of the coffee, burnt a little from sitting in the pot too long, sweet for him, and not for her. Under it all lay the sour tang of the powder, and the iron taste of the metal of the guns. A hint of sawdust, the dry earthy smell of the paper, the residual sharp note of the Pine Sol.

A catalogue of scents that were more home for her than her house was. Almost as much home as the smells of the farm, which were harsher, earthier, more redolent with death and life all jumbled together. The range was a strange combination of sterile cleaning smells and the iron bite of death in a three foot tube.

"Harold," she finally said, ignoring the way his eyebrows shot up at the use of his first name. This was a familiarity that she almost never took with the corporal, but somehow it seemed important to make him understand. Calling him Harold was the auditory equivalent of grabbig him by the earlobe and twisting until his head bent down to meet hers. "Have you ever bled out a pig?"

Not quite sure where this conversation was headed, the corporal shook his head. "No, I don't have any farmers in my family. My grandfather was a farrier and my grandmother was a baker, so I grew up in the forge and the kitchen. My parents are both full time police officers, so I suppose I come by it honestly."

With a nod, she continued. "I think I was about eleven the first time. We were there the week before Easter, and grandpa figured I should know where the ham comes from. So we went out back and picked one of the smaller pigs."

"I've never been a very big girl, so he deliberately chose a piglet he figured I could hang on to while he did everything else." Kelly chuckled. "He didn't tell me, not exactly, what was going to happen. Not because he figured I couldn't take it, but because Grandpa has always been big on the whole notion of authentic responses. I guess he figured if he warned me I'd react differently."

Corpral Fenwick was admittedly at a bit of a loss as to where this was going. He was trying to figure out what on earth having an eleven year old watch a pig be killed had to do with his original question, but he decided to let Kelly have her head and get to the point in her own way. She was a good kid, but sometimes he felt like her brain didn't quite run on the same wavelength as the rest of the human race.

"So here I am hanging onto a pig darned near half as big as I am, with my arms wrapped under his armpits or whatever the right word is," she explained, standing up and walking behind the corporal to grab him from behind in the sort of awkward hug she remembered. "Sort of like this. And the pig is not impressed, and he's kicking and squirming and screeching and just carrying on like an old woman - I had bruises on my shins for WEEKS after. It's kind of weird how much a scared pig sounds like a scared little kid. I think that was part of the point."

Sitting quietly with his protege's arms wrapped under his armpits, Harold tried to imagine getting his ten year old girl to do this, and the thought made him shudder. He'd heard pigs in a full out mad once or twice in his life - he was a city kid, not a complete idiot - and he couldn't imagine what little Samantha would have done in that situation.

Kelly's voice grew soft with memory and Harold felt her rest her chin on her adoptive 'uncle's' head. "And then Grandpa, no warning, hauls a straight razor out of his pocket and before I can even think about what he's about to do, slits the pig's throat."

"Harold," her voice softened even more and he shivered as he felt her smile at something he couldn't see, "it was just stupid how much blood there was. I mean, you see it on tv and stuff, but the stupid pig doesn't realize it's dead yet, and the cut isn't deep enough to sever the spinal column so here's all ninety pounds of me hanging on for dear life, and the blood is just running down over my hands and they're all slippery."

"It's warm too," she added, chuckling. "I mean you know the phrase warm-blooded, right, but you don't expect it to be that hot. And as it gets cold it gets stickier, so what used to be too slippery to hang on to is now all kind of gooey and sticky like homemade caramel and of course, the stupid pig is covered in bristles, so now my hands are covered in little prickly hairs."

She paused thoughtfully with her arms wrapped around him, and Harold Fenwick seriously wondered whether or not he had any idea who he was dealing with, or if he ever did.

"The stuff you see in the movies about how arterial blood spurts out of a neck wound isn't really right either," she added. "It does a little at first, but when the head shifts forward again, the wound mostly closes and it's a bit more like chocolate running off a dipped strawberry than spurting per se. Anyhow, I hung onto that pig for nigh fifteen minutes until the stupid thing figured out it was dead."

Kelly let go of Harold and went to go sit back down. Looking up at her mentor with a shrug, she grinned. "And then I spent another three and a half hours skinning it - and let me tell you, dipping twenty odd pounds of pig into a trough of boiling water is NOT an eay job, but it's how you loosen the bristles from the skin - and then hang it to bleed out the rest of the way. Grandpa explained that only about a third of the blood was actually out of the pig yet; the rest of it had to drain out over a week or so."

"Normally he would have put it into the smokehouse after that, but since we were using it, he had me get a Sharpie out of the shed - good old Sharpie markers, write on freaking ANYTHING, I tell you - and drew out the various cuts on the pig so I'd know where the chops and the hocks and all that come from."

the teenager actually chuckled, running a hand through her hair and shaking her head. Harold was trying hard not to let his shock and dismay show on his face. Maybe he needed to have a talk with the seargent major about her. He wasn't entirely sure he knew what to do with this information.

"Once we got it trussed up, he took me out back behind the woodshed and hosed me off. There was a couple of bars of Ivory soap near the well, so I grabbed one and stripped down to my skivvies so I could get most of the way cleaned up," she explained with a grin that made the corporal's teeth ache in some weird primordial response to the utter lack of disgust in her expression. She seemed gleeful, and that was terrifying.

"We burned the clothes, of course. Blood wasn't the only thing that came out of that pig and you just can't get the smell of pig crap out of anything, ever, but I had lots of extra clothes at Grandpa's place, so I don't even know that my parents noticed." Kelly shrugged and paused to take a sip of her coffee.

"Harold, I want to be a sniper when I grow up. I am very good at what I do. More specficially, I want to be a SEAL sniper - if I can't be with the best of the best, then there is no point," she explained quietly. "I've killed things with my own two hands and held them when they died. The next time around, he handed me the razor and said that if I was going to reap the benefit, I needed to take the responsibility. So I did."

"You are sitting here and asking a woman who slaughtered her first full grown sow with her own two hands at twelve whether or not I think I can kill a man from two miles away through a scope?" Kelly frowned, the first emotion Harold could make any sense out of in this whole discussion. "Don't insult my intelligence, old man. I knew what I was signing up for."