Zoe Bossiere
Ohio University graduate student Zoë Bossiere authors a startling new memoir essay on the Guernica website, titled “Fear in the Time of the Javelina: A younger boy swore he’d seen one of the pigs standing on its hind legs, peering through his trailer window.”
Bossiere is a Ph.D. in English candidate in the non-fiction program at OHIO.
What started as a rumor, sweeping from one end of Cactus Country RV Park to the other like a tumbleweed, was now an immutable fact: the pigs were back.
From the playground, we children surveyed the evidence, marking what we knew on a crude map of the park drawn in the dirt with a stick. The javelina had been spotted three nights in a row by various neighbors out walking their dogs. We’d seen their small, heart-shaped tracks imprinted in the dry riverbed. Their poop was unmistakable, lumpy pellets strewn over the earth like busted rolls of quarters. The javelina would drink from the shallow birdbaths and eat seed that dropped from the feeders along the park’s barbed wire fence. That fence was meant to keep ranchers’ cows from wandering into the park, to protect them from getting hit by massive, rumbling class A motorhomes and trucks hauling long, triple-axle fifth-wheel trailers. But the javelina could duck under the fence, no problem….
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