A Conspiracy of Owls

The sun hadn’t even crested the loblolly’s in the meadow and bedlam seeped into the periphery of the unseasonably sweltering morning. The air was pungent, like a camellia with wilted downy petals, its once untainted allure succumbed to a rotten future. Camellias didn’t just wither. They loitered beyond their tenure, an ominous blemish amongst a dense virility of glossed leaves. Their scent beguiled each passerby, coaxing them to heed their threat. The future is unforgiving to the precious, it said. 

Vicky Owens sneered at the flowers as she passed and fantasized about pulling each and every limp bloom from its final resting place and ferally throwing them onto the gravel road. But she resisted this temptation. Only because if she did pluck them up, her hands would absorb their floral stench. She’d hated camellias her entire life for this reason. Their scent reminded her of her dead grandmother, Rose. 

Rose, who would never let anyone forget about her days as a dancer in Las Vegas. Rose, who had exited the world with nicotine-stained teeth encased by wrinkled, scarlet lips.

Vicky would not go quietly into the night. She self-administered Botox to counteract the deep crease that had formed between her eyebrows. She moisturized, exfoliated, oiled, waxed, and plucked herself to perfection ritualistically, studying each rebellious pore in the ultra-magnifying mirror on her vanity table. Every week, on Tuesdays, she made the 45-minute drive into the city to have her hair cut and colored to the honey brown hue of her youth. She liked to imagine the chemicals suffocating her grey hairs into obedience. On Thursdays she got a manicure and pedicure, relishing the swift, abrasive strokes of Ginnie, her Vietnamese nail technician who patiently grated away the wear and tear of Vicky’s life from her worn and weathered hands and feet. 

It was when her son, Garrett, failed out of college for the second time Vicky succeeded in permanently mutilating her once beautiful left hand. Her wedding ring had gotten caught up in the framing of the 42” flat screen television when she threw it, with great gusto, off of the second-story porch of their home, and onto the hood of his car, which she was still making payments on at the time. The television had been a birthday gift for him two years prior. It fell to its thunderous demise amongst her own tortured screams. 

It took great effort to artfully avoid discussion of her “degloving” at social functions afterward. Eventually, when it did heal, she never regained movement in the finger. Needless to say, her wedding ring had also stayed boxed in her nightstand for quite some time, something she and Bill never discussed. 

Now, on her right hand, a nail struggled to emerge from under the skin of her battle scar. She hadn’t spoken to Garrett in the two years since she had kicked his slothful, lazy, ungrateful, puckered ass out. Bill was left to deal with him, issuing his monthly $1,300 allowance, pulling strings to quietly get him re-enrolled into a local, less challenging community college. Garrett was a disgrace to everything they’d fought so hard to have in their lives. He was unworthy of their four homes, three in the states and one in the Virgin Islands. He did not deserve a single one of the eight vehicles registered to their names, though he still drove the X3 which bore the brunt of her outrage that day. They paid for the hood to be replaced, of course. 

Everything everyone else could ever want the Owens made sure to have at least three of. Sadly, money could not buy them the eldest son they could be proud of. Garrett was a defect on the face of their nearly perfected existence. He was too fat for military school, too indolent for academia, too insecure for any kind of natural leadership. Exhausted by him, Vicky had decided it was better to not acknowledge him at all. She had made a solemn oath to herself to never accept disappointment. Garrett had amounted to nothing more than that: a disappointment. 

They were almost done with their morning walk now, Vicky and Bill. She had almost forgotten her husband again. What was it he had been going on and on about? Their real estate investments? Had he mentioned Garrett? He seemed anxious. She was glad to have her hair appointment later that day. Let Bill worry himself to death at the house–she would be elsewhere. 

Vicky had money of her own to play with, and plenty of it. Her incredibly successful interior design business had earned her over six figures and a featured article in Southern Life last year, affording her the freedom to embark on a Peruvian yoga vacation with her best friend Mina, as well as a complete renovation of the bedroom and porch that her now unmentionable son had once occupied. It also funded her pigs. They had brought her some satisfaction over the past two years. For one spring they had made her the talk of the Jubilee community and the trophy of everyone’s Instagram feeds. That had been back when the pigs had been young and cute. Before their muddy stye had taken up over a quarter acre of their two-acre estate, which was one of the largest in Jubilee. She had temporarily overlooked the pig’s oafishness because her sow, a 750-pound Angeln Saddleback named Aunt Hamilton, had earned a gold ribbon at the county fair. Vicky had decided to get into pig farming shortly after she had successfully obtained her pilot’s license and immediately after dropping her second attempt to become a cellist. During her third lesson her teacher, someone of great acclaim that a client had referred her, had cast a judgmental glance at her shorn finger. That had been the end of that. 

Vicky had served on the board of the Charlotte Chamber society for 5 years, and since joining had annually tried to take her appreciation of music a step further by becoming a musician herself. Through this habit, she had collected a $20,000 piano, a $7,000 violin, and a $15,000 harp––which she had actually greatly enjoyed before the fateful finger slice––as well as the $12,000 cello. The pig farming had been a whim after she drank five martinis while rewatching Babe one night.

After her purchase of Aunt Hamilton, she had coerced one of the local farmers from outside Jubilee, James Johnson, into breeding one of his pigs with hers and splitting the drift between them. The piglets had been adorable last autumn. At the time, she’d had her hands full with the redecoration of a few show homes in the community, so she hired a local man Mr. Johnson had recommended, Ben Cole, to live in their in-law suite and manage the pigs for her. She’d paid for $10,000 worth of the best electric fencing on the market, not to mention hundreds of dollars in organic feed and everything he’d need, on top of paying Ben a part-time competitive salary and providing him with housing––incredible, impeccably decorated housing––with all utilities included. And it would be impossible not to take into account the wining and dining, because she had invited Ben over for family dinners multiple times a week since he’d moved in, and even went so far as to take him out on occasion. 

And yet, Ben, in a matter of a few months, had proven himself untrustworthy. 

It started with the weed. Ben had gone out with a friend of his, a local strawberry farmer, and came back wreaking of it. Vicky herself had never engaged in drug use of any sort, save the prescription medications her doctor gave her––with Garrett in their life, who wouldn’t need the occasional Vicodin?––but Vicky didn’t see the point in compromising her precious brain cells by smoking anything. It was beneath her. 

The next day, when she knew Ben would be out, she ventured into the in-law suite. It was her house, after all, and they had no formal lease in place. She found her beautiful home a complete and utter disgrace. It smelled like man sweat. There were fingerprints on all of the doorknobs and doors. The bed was unmade and from what she could smell, the sheets had not been washed in some time. Dirty clothes, books, and lord-knows-what-else were strewn all over the 800-square foot space. Thin layers of dust coated every built-in bookshelf and poured concrete countertop. In the bathroom, there were tiny flecks of toothpaste all over the marble sink, counter, and even on the mirror. The tiny trashcan next to the toilet was overflowing with discarded toilet paper used as tissue. In the kitchen, the sink was overflowing with dishes, as was the dishwasher––all he had to push was a button! A single button! She resisted the urge to run the machine herself. Across from the refrigerator, on the kitchen island, a half-drunk Budweiser sat next to an empty plastic wrapper of Ballpark hot dogs, the meat juice still inside.

Her home was being treated like the dormitory of her nightmares. 

As she stood, nearly vomitous with disgust, something caught her eye. A pepper-grinder, a little worn but of too high a quality to belong to Ben. She went over to inspect it with her good hand. A Williams Sonoma pepper grinder, in this hell-hole? What, did he like, freshly ground pepper on his cold hot dogs? The pepper grinder itself didn’t look immediately familiar to her, but her suspicions were raised nonetheless. Had he stolen one of her pepper grinders? She put it back down on the countertop and left in a rage. 

That afternoon Vicky drove to the local Home Depot and purchased a large plastic owl––the kind to keep pests away. Pests like Ben Cole, whom she had unwittingly permitted into her home. She also purchased a home surveillance system. When she got home, she busied herself in the garage, drilling out one of the bird’s large plastic golden eyes and replacing it with one of the small cameras, which she secured in the interior of the hollow owl with duct tape. The drill burned against the plastic, filling the air with the sour scent of charred chemicals, no doubt carcinogens. Security came at a price. By the time Ben got back that evening the owl was firmly placed on the eve of the garage, facing the exterior of the in-law suite. She would tell Bill about her ingenious plot over dinner. He would toast her intrepidness. 

She made eye contact with Ben as he made his way into her house from his car. “Afternoon Mrs. Owens,” he said, tipping a hat he was not wearing. Even his gestures were lies. Before she would have found the exchange charming but now she was awake. She raised her glass and squinted a smirk at him from her patio. “Hello Benjamin,” she said, hoping he picked up on the attempted homage to Elizabeth Taylor in her voice. He did not. “Beautiful day,” he responded, “about to go check on the pigs for you.” Then, just as she had hoped, his eyes drifted upwards, to the owl. “Having trouble with birds Mrs. Owens?” She took a languid sip of her martini, taking great care not to spill on her linen blouse. “You could say that,” she said, slowly moving the martini glass away from her glossed lips and holding it delicately in the air, parallel to her head. “I love owls,” she added, “the sign of Athena, the wise woman, defender of the night.” Ben seemed off-guard as if he could feel the tide changing on him, pulling him under and away. “Owls are pretty cool,” he complied before making his way back toward the stye. She followed him with her eyes feeling much like Athena herself. Empowered. Vigilant. Perceptive. 

When Bill came home she had a specially made dinner ready, his favorite, Braciole Steak. Bill usually took care of the cooking, but she felt like buttering him up that night. Along with the tantalizing aroma of their impending meal, she greeted him with scotch on ice. But not just any scotch–this was some Macallan rare cask they saved for special occasions, served in a Norlan whiskey glass with a single, large square ice cube in its center. 

She realized she had gone overboard with the preparations as soon as she handed him the glass. He got that salty twinkle in his eye. Bill was hoping to get laid tonight. He was sadly mistaken, but that was no matter. 

“What’s the occasion?” he asked, raising a hopeful eyebrow and taking a sip of his scotch without breaking eye contact. 

“Can’t a wife dote on her husband?” she said, loosening his tie. He smiled and slipped his hand downward, toward her ass. She slipped away and coaxed him into getting settled for the evening. When he sat down she walked over to him, resting her good hand on his broad shoulder. “Honey, we need to talk about Ben. . . he needs to go.” 

He turned to her in surprise. “What do you mean? The pigs love him! Did he do something to them? Did one of them get out?” 

“Oh no, he’s out there night and day. It’s more to do with him, himself. The other day he went out with some friends of his and came home wreaking of pot.” 

“Okay . . .” she could tell he was intrigued. Her husband was such a gossip. Knowing that had always served her beautifully. 

“Well, honey, that reflects poorly on us, in the community, him going around odorous like that. And what other drugs could he be doing? So today while he was out I went into the apartment to check on the state of things. . .” Pregnant pauses were a tactic she loved to employ to build up suspense in conversations. She went on to describe the insulting disarray in vivid detail. Over dinner, she addressed the concern of the possibly thieved pepper mill.

Bill did toast to her that evening, eventually. He, too, was in complete shock at the disarray and the sordid intentions of their tenant. Bill loved cooking, even fancied himself pretty decent at it. He knew all of the best and most expensive chefs in town and even considered a few of them friends. He gravely disliked the idea of someone rifling through their kitchen, stealing one of his pepper grinders. What would that lead to next? Cookbooks? Utensils? His copper core pans? 

“Why don’t we take an inventory of the kitchen while we’re at it?” He had gotten up from the table to mill through his spice cabinet, to see if anything else was missing. Five. He counted five pepper grinders. He could not recall whether or not there had been a sixth and that troubled him. But he was a smart man, considered brilliant in some circles, or so he’d been told. He was a corporate consultant and community volunteer, sitting simultaneously on no less than three boards at a time, one of which he was chair of. He was a man who had made a career off of the sound advice he issued. He would not be outwitted by a pig farmer. 

They agreed. A thorough inventory would be conducted. They canceled an entire Sunday’s worth of activities to do so, including one luncheon, a cocktail party, and an invitation-only five-course meal with the executive chef of Shooting Range, one of the most prestigious restaurants in Charlotte. Bill organized the inventory neatly in an Excel spreadsheet. Vicky was his dutiful assistant for about an hour before expressing her fatigue with the matter and leaving with Mina to the local pool, to which they paid $5,000 a year to have a membership. “You’re just so much more organized and methodical about these things than I am, honey.” She said, throwing on a linen cover-up over her one-piece. Her arms were bedecked with several jangling gold bracelets and her honey-colored air looked particularly smooth that morning. Bill secretly hoped that the completion of the inventory would mean an invitation back into their master suite that night. Though he worshipped his wife, it had been years since he had passed an entire night beside her. His chronic snoring had set in at age 30 and only gained gusto as he aged. For that reason, for about the past 20 of their 40-year marriage, he passed the night on the couch or in one of their guest rooms. When the kids were visiting around the holidays, he inflated an air mattress in their master bathroom while Vicky slept with earplugs. 

But by the early afternoon, the inventory was only 3⁄4's completed. Bill gave up and decided instead to watch a documentary on sushi he had noticed was streaming a few weeks prior. Concerned that his abandonment of the inventory might wreck his chances of sleeping next to his wife that night, he took up researching lavish tours of the Japanese countryside for an anniversary vacation the following spring. The documentary stated that the reservations at the sushi chef’s restaurant were already booked two years out, but Bill had connections. He went ahead and booked their flights with his Amex. 

Weeks passed. As far as they could tell, no further kitchen items had been compromised. No further sordid scents emanated from Ben. The owls began to appear everywhere. Just because Vicky hadn’t seen anything yet didn’t mean nothing was amiss. She simply didn’t have enough eyes out. They stopped inviting over Ben for dinner. He went about his piggy business, but Vicky wanted to make sure he knew he was being watched. He saw her gazing pensively at the in-law suite from her back porch as she sipped her morning coffee. Then again from the window frames in the afternoons, and the back patio with a martini in the early evenings. 

After a month of her omnipresence, Ben issued them his formal notice, much to their relief. He fed them some nonsense about getting into his own business and opening a farm-to-table concept with Ralph Cattio, a famous BBQ Chef from Charleston. Bill scoffed at this. He had met Ralph at a fundraiser once, surely he would have reached out to Bill before stealing away his pig farmer, not that he was sad to see Ben leave. A pang of jealousy picked at his heart, especially when he got wind of the fact that Claudia Garamone, the co-founder of Jubilee had set the whole thing up behind his back. 

“Good riddance!” Vicky said, slamming the door behind her. 

The weeks that followed were cursed. Vicky was left to tend for the pigs herself, changing their water, carrying two one-gallon buckets at a time from the house to the trough. She cleaned their bed liner herself, too. The straw caused her arms to break out in hives for at least half of the day. She dreaded the horror and the filth of each morning. Then, one day Vicky brazenly made her way into the pen, 176 pounds of full-blooded woman surrounded by over a gluttonous ton of cumulative pork, only to slip in their shit and land––thank goodness her hands broke her fall––square into it. 

To say she shrieked would be a gross understatement. She was covered from head-to-toe in their decay, their flotsam. She bellowed out of the pigpen and to their outdoor shower, which she had never used. She was tempted to burn the leggings she had on but settled for simply throwing them in a 200G lawn bag. It was all cobwebs and dust in there, and it smelled heavily like long-since expired Miracle-Gro. She exited the shed naked and disgusted with the vile, sick creatures she’d granted sanctuary to in her once pristine backyard. The owls, her self-imposed guardians, stared at her mockingly, their single golden eyes glinting in the late morning sun. Basking in her nakedness she made a new vow to herself: the next undertaking would be grand. It would restore her backyard to its true majesty. 

She made her way inside to get clean, not merely hose off. The shower that followed was a fury. She brought her antibacterial hand soap in with her and scrubbed every crevice and fold of her body with rigor. She used her microdermabrasion on her face and clarifying shampoo, which she rinsed and repeated, before applying a deep conditioner. She scrubbed her nails with her husband’s nail brush, and her feet with a pumice stone she had received as a gift but never used. She was sitting on the shower bench, contorted like a Cirque du Soleil performer while at work on her left heel when her sixth sense kicked in–someone was at her house. Her suspicions were confirmed when the motion sensor on her alarm system pinged her phone on the bathroom countertop. 

She made a small trail of water on her way down to the office where their security cameras were on display on a small, flat screen. Despite the high-definition capabilities of what had once been her son’s computer screen, the resolution transmitted from each owl eye was pitifully grainy. Despite this, she was confident that Ben Cole was back and trespassing on their property, likely returning to rummage through their belongings in the carriage house under the guise of having left something behind. She ran back upstairs, nearly slipping on the water that had trailed behind her, and threw on her most regal poncho and some pants. She grabbed the can of bear mace they kept under the kitchen sink that Bill had bought a few years ago when their trash had been torn apart.

“Get out of my driveway!” she yelled. “Get off of my property! Who do you think you are, coming back here, you lousy, vapid, pot-smoking, lazy-eyed son of a bi-” She took the safety off of the can as she made her way down the driveway, then brandished it like a loaded pistol before she realized that it wasn’t Ben Cole at all. Staring at her, slack-jawed and speechless, was the oafish, plump frame of her excommunicated son, Garrett. “Mom!” he yelled, the tinge of familial affection in his voice was encompassed by fear. “Dad said it was okay. I just need to stay with y’all for a couple of weeks before I move out to Vail.”

She stopped about ten feet shy of him, with a white-knuckle grip on the mace. “Vail?” How had Bill failed to inform her that their son was moving to Colorado? Surely he had failed out of college again, unable to even pass business courses at a local community college.

“Yeah, Vail--I’m going to be managing the--” 

“I DON’T GIVE A SHIIIIIIT!” Her voice curdled with anger. She charged at him with her finger holding down the mace trigger.

“Mom? Mom! Oh, shit!” Garrett took off into the yard shortly with Vicky not far behind him. The trashcan had only ever been rummaged through the one time, no one in the family had ever used the bear mace, so the thick fog that plumed from the can came as quite a surprise. Vicky had assumed it would come out in a straight line, like normal mace. The cloud did not deter her. 

“Shit mom!” Garrett was stumbling and rubbing his eyes, “What the fuck is that?” He coughed.

“It’s bear mace,” she stammered, “you sack of shit!” Vicky’s eyes were burning too. It was beginning to get hard to breath. Her blind rage guided her.

She heard Garrett stumble. “Shit! Ow! Fuck!” 

The distinct squeal of panicked pigs followed his fall to the ground. 

She toppled over him blindly, then rolled off of him. He gave a long, pained groan. She shrieked in agony and clawed at the ground around her. She palmed the grounded electric net fencing in her hands. Powerless. Fallen. 

“YOU LET THE PIGS OUT!” She rolled back toward her son and started pummeling him with her fists. He blocked her as best he could before holding his forearms over his head in defense.

“YOU. BEAR. MACED. ME. MOM.” He continued to cough between small punches. Exhausted and burning in agony from the mace she rolled over again, withered in defeat. After what felt like an eternity, she heard Garrett heave himself up and trudge toward the house. But Vicky stayed where she was, her head in a cavity of thick, cold mud. She caked some on her face, anything for relief from the mace. She could hear the pigs squealing in the distance, undoubtedly digging up the grass in her front lawn. But then the sound of one drew closer. The mud slid down the sides of Vicky’s face toward her ears, and she wiped it off as best she could before slowly sitting up and squinting open her eyes. Her poncho congealed on the ground behind her. She made out the form of Aunt Hamilton standing before her in judgment. Aunt Hamilton, her prized sow. Aunt Hamilton with twelve swinging tits and a beard. Aunt Hamilton, a mother who didn’t care if her children were fat, or lazy, or gleefully wrecking a front yard with their noses. Aunt Hamilton wandered off, leaving Vicky thinking only of herself. How she wished Bill would come back to help clean her off, maybe make her a cosmo, and order in for the night. How she wished she could muster up the courage to apologize to her son, but she knew there was no use in that. It wasn’t her role. She was the battle-ax of the family, the stronghold. If she fell, the walls of her entire existence would crumble around her. 

She rose, ignoring the pain in her eyes and lungs, and pulled out her phone. She thumbed through her contacts until she found James Johnson, the farmer she had split the drove with. It rang twice before he answered.

“James, I need you to come pick up these pigs. Now.”