A Little Pig

I found the account at 10:14 on a Tuesday night, while I was trying to prove that a ferry terminal had once sold cinnamon rolls. My desk at the Bracken Bay Historical Society was a paper tide. Letter-size scans, donor forms, and three open browser windows crowded around my laptop. I had a grant application due Friday for an oral-history project about the old waterfront, and one footnote was holding up the whole proposal. A retired ferry worker had mentioned a bakery cart in a recording. If I could verify it, I could build a small exhibit around the people who had fed the night crews. I searched the phrase the worker had used, then the name of the terminal, then the name of a local history group that had folded years ago. A discussion thread came up on an archive site called Spindle. Most of it was dead links and arguments about parking. One user had posted a photo of a paper cup and a paper bag on the terminal's old loading dock. The post was captioned, "Nothing says preservation like reheated coffee and a pastry that tastes like a wet sock." I nearly closed the tab. Then I noticed the account had quoted the former ferry worker's name. I clicked through, hoping for the source of the photo. The profile was called A Little Pig. Its avatar was a pink ceramic pig with a chipped ear. There were 1,097 posts. I started with the ones connected to the ferry terminal. The first few were ordinary complaints about roadwork, bad coffee, and tourists who stood in the bike lane. Then the posts turned personal. "Some people go to a community meeting to listen. Some people go to be seen listening." "New haircut. Same expression that says the room should be grateful she arrived." "Anyone else think a certain museum girl treats every conversation like an interview?" I didn't recognize myself in the first post. I did in the second. I had cut my hair in March. The last post had been written in February, after a neighborhood meeting where I had taken notes for my project. I sat back and looked around the empty office. The radiator clicked. The rain blurred the black windows. I had been alone for two hours, except for the security guard's distant footsteps in the hall. I clicked older. A post about my mustard-yellow raincoat. One about my habit of ordering black coffee with oat milk. One about the tiny pig figurine I kept on my desk, the one my grandmother had given me before she died. "Some people collect farmyard junk and call it a personality." I swallowed. I knew the account was anonymous. I knew a stranger could have noticed the coat or the mug. But the posts kept going. A reference to a bad dinner at Eli's apartment. A detail from the week I'd been worried about my mother. A line about how I "turned a simple question into a courtroom" after Eli and I argued about whether he was going to move in with me. That argument had happened in my kitchen, with the windows shut and the radio on. The only other person who had been there was Eli. I scrolled back to the profile summary. A Little Pig had been active for six years. The earliest post was a photograph of a cracked pink ceramic pig on a windowsill. My fingertips went cold. I recognized the chipped ear. Eli's childhood friend Simon had a ceramic pig just like it. I'd seen it in the background of his videos, on a shelf in the little apartment he rented above his recording studio. He'd told me it came from his mother's kitchen. I'd never thought twice about it. I opened the most recent posts. The account had uploaded one the day before. "Someone's finally getting a shot at the waterfront project. Watch her turn a five-minute interview into a shrine to herself." The grant application was still in progress. Only a few people knew I was applying. Eli knew. Leah knew. Simon knew because Eli had asked him to check a recording for me. My phone buzzed. Eli's name lit the screen. Eli: Are you still at the office? I brought home Thai. I stared at the message until the screen dimmed. Then I opened a blank document and began writing down what I'd found: dates, post numbers, exact wording, and details I could verify. I didn't know what I would do with the list. I only knew I couldn't trust myself to remember it clearly once someone began telling me I had misunderstood. At 11:03, I closed the archive page and drove home through the rain. Eli was on my couch with two takeout cartons and his shoes off. He smiled when I came in, then stopped when he saw my face. "What happened?" "I found something while I was working." He stood and reached for my coat. I kept it on. "What kind of something?" "A social account. Anonymous. It has more than a thousand posts about me." His hand remained in the air between us. "About you?" "Almost all of them. Complaints. Criticism. Details from the last few years." "Who wrote them?" "I think Simon did." Eli lowered his hand. The pause was small, but I felt it. "You think?" he asked. "I recognize his apartment. The account has his pig. It knew about things we never discussed outside the two of us." He looked toward the takeout. "That doesn't mean it's Simon." "No. It means I'm going to ask him." I took off my coat and laid it over the back of a chair. My hands were shaking, and I didn't want Eli to mistake that for an invitation to make the decision for me. "Did you know he was writing about me?" "No." He said it quickly. Not angrily. Not calmly, either. I studied his face, looking for the tiny expressions I used to be able to read. I found worry and fatigue and something that might have been fear. "Did you ever talk to him about us?" I asked. "Of course. He's my best friend." "That wasn't my question." Eli glanced down at the cartons. "We've talked about stuff." "Private stuff?" "We talk. That's what friends do." I felt the room tighten around us. I had wanted him to say, No, I never gave him anything to use. Instead, he had given me a sentence that could hold almost anything. I picked up my phone and opened my notes. "I'm going to ask Simon," I said. "And I want you to think about what you've told him."