There was a fourth little pig ... the runt of the litter, which is why he wasn't mentioned up until now. Puny, and with a slightly out-a-kilter snout, his short-times milking on Mama Sow's teats rudely interrupted by his bullying brothers and sisters who paid no attention to his high-pitched squeals of agony. He did not found a start-up using stolen money and vast quantities of venture capital, like his brothers and sisters; he was never seen on FaceBook, and didn't have enough iBacon to even log-on to Twitter, let alone pony-up one-hundred-and-forty words. Needless to say: from these circumstances ... genes, early childhood, environment, etc. ... and the fact that he was not stupid, indeed: he grew extremely smart ... shrewd even ... and determined, above all, to do one thing well: to survive. Of course he was shocked by the news of his three brothers untimely deaths ... was one or two a sister, he asked himself, and then chided himself that he couldn't remember ... but he shed no tears, and he continued to walk the desolate beach devoid of birds of any kinds, near where he had found a kind of a cave that provided shelter, as well as a diet of nourishing mushrooms. He meditated on his siblings deaths, seeking the meaning of their violent demise: it was obvious that all the deaths had in common houses and birds, but what was the missing factor, where was the Wagnerian leit-motiv that summoned Lord Death from his underground Kingdom to incarnate as a serial swine offer, whose modus operandi involved birds ? His meditations deepened as he thought about the millions of pigs killed every year ... not by birds, but by human beings. He grew older, he grew fatter on the rich mushrooms in the cave ... but not too fat ... he knew that being too fat was an advertisement for bacon, so he was careful to make sure his daily beach walk turned into a heart-thumping run to burn calories. He once saw himself reflected in a pool of standing water after a heavy rain: 'svelte pig,' he thought to himself. One day in the cave he saw a strange mushroom, slightly purplish ... in a shape like a large key ... he'd never seen before. He snouted it, and felt dizzy from its complex intoxicating aroma of mouldy fish-heads, rotting bread, with a top-note of horse-piss. He ate it. The world that he knew suddenly turned itself inside out and he ... for several hours ... seemed to fly through both time and space while vision after vision ... sometimes of porcine paradises where nubile pigstresses twitched their fat rear
