Lipstick On A Pig

Chapter 1

“This is humiliating. I hate it, and I hate you,” Bee scowled. She was in prime form this morning. I sighed as I placed her bed on the little fold-out table where I was collecting donations for the petting zoo.

It was summer festival time in Willow Bay. Taking place during the second and third weeks of August, the festival was the busiest time of the year. We even got food trucks from Portland to come down and line the streets, adding a little bit of variety to the eight or so places in town where you could normally get a meal.

As the local vet clinic owner, every year I was the major sponsor for one of the prime family attractions—the petting zoo. That’s where I was now, setting up for the day, as I volunteered to help run the petting zoo every year. Not only was it good for the community, and the donations that people gave to have their children pet local farm animals all went to the local animal shelter, but this year there was an added bonus: my favorite Portland taco truck was parked right at the entrance to the Park, only about fifty feet from where our giant tent was set up. I couldn’t wait for them to open this morning.

Every year, we normally had the local animal shelter bring down all the dogs and cats they had available for adoption as one of the major features of the petting zoo. And while this year we did have a handful of dogs, we also had the incredibly enviable position of all the local cats in the shelter having been adopted! So, to make sure all our animal friends were represented, I had volunteered Bee to come and sleep nicely in her bed at my table and let herself be pet by little kids who wanted to see all the animals.

Unfortunately, Bee wasn’t quite as civic-minded as I was, and was making her opinions known.

“Do you know how disgusting children are? Their hands are sticky. Why are they sticky?” I sighed. In twenty minutes other people were going to start showing up, to help with the petting zoo and the other attractions in the park, and Bee would stop huffing and pretend to be better than everyone else by ignoring everything going on around her—like she did every day at the vet clinic. Or so I hoped. Those twenty minutes couldn’t come soon enough. To think, it was only the first day of the festival. After today, I still had to deal with this for eleven more days.

I guess I should explain a little bit. I’m a witch. I can cast spells, and like all witches, I have one power that’s unique to me. Mine is that I can speak to animals, and Bee is my little black cat. I like to say she has a lot of personality. It’s a polite way of saying she’s a completely narcissistic drama queen.

“Remember to be nice today, Bee. You can ignore everyone, but no claws. Remember, if you try to scratch anyone, you’re not getting your sushi roll tonight.”

Bee had managed to negotiate a roll of sushi, her favorite treat, as payment for each day that she had to sit there and let herself be pet. It might sound like a lot, but she started off by asking for a box each day, so I felt like I negotiated her down reasonably well. Or that was what I told myself, at least. I didn’t want to admit to myself, or to anyone else, that my cat was a better negotiator than I was.

“You told me I have to be here, you didn’t say I had to behave.”

“Well I’m telling you now.”

“That’s not in my contract.”

“You didn’t sign a contract.”

“It was verbal.”

“Fine, well, I’m amending the contract. You scratch anyone or you bite anyone and you don’t get any sushi.”

Bee scowled at me, walked over to where I was getting the big sign that read Healthy Paws’ Petting Zoo to put along the front of the fold out table and deliberately knocked a pair of scissors onto the floor. I rolled my eyes. I loved Bee, but sometimes my little black cat could be infuriating.

Before I had a chance to scold her, however, Sophie showed up driving a large pickup truck, which she parked about ten feet in front of the front of the tent. I could hear squealing in the back and I smiled.

“Hey,” I said to my best friend as she got out of the cab, and we both went to the back of the truck. “What did you get for us this year?” I asked.

“Well, this year we have four goats, including little ones, two sheep, six chickens, a rabbit who comes with his own hutch, and seven piglets.”

Joe Clemens was a farmer on the outskirts of town. He made his money from the plentiful crops that he grew, and kept a bunch of animals on the farm as a hobby. Every year he outfitted the petting zoo with whatever cute little additions his farm had generated that spring.

“Awwwwww,” I said, looking into the back of the truck at the big dog kennels that we used as makeshift farm animal carriers.

“So Joe says everyone should be fine together, except we should probably separate the pigs from everyone else. Apparently they’re pretty high energy, and some of the other animals aren’t exactly fans.”

I laughed as I heard snorting coming from the back of the truck.

“We’re not high energy, it’s just that the goats are boring. It’s always the goats. They’re such whiners!” came a high pitched voice from the back of the truck. I had a feeling I knew which animals the pigs didn’t get along with.

“Agreed. Down with the goats!” came another. I supressed a smile.

“Please, keep us apart. You see what we have to deal with on a daily basis?” one of the goats replied.

“But mommy, I’m friends with one of them,” came the whine from one of the little goats.

“Don’t be friends with pigs. They’re disgusting, and you’re better than that.”

Great. We had a racist goat on our hands. This was going to be an interesting eleven days.

“All right guys, everyone hang tight. We’re just going to go set up the area here for you all so everyone’s comfortable,” I told the animals, hoping they’d all stop fighting long enough for us to get things sorted out.

Sophie and I went past my little entrance table and into the tent. A three-foot-high fence was set up to keep the animals in, and we had extra fencing to be able to split the animals into different sections, just for situations like this one. We had four different troughs of water, some others that were currently empty for food, and the entire ground area was lined with hay. The tent that had been borrowed for the petting zoo was pretty big; the entire inside of the petting zoo measured around thirty feet by twenty feet, so there would be plenty of space for the animals to roam around.

“Ok,” I told Sophie. “So, we need a separate area for the dogs that are coming later. I spoke to Emily at the shelter and she’s going to bring them over in about forty minutes. That way, the dogs will have about an hour to settle in before we open. There’s going to be eight of them, mostly medium and large dogs, and none that are so rowdy that they’re likely to try to escape. They’re all friendly and they can all be in the same spot. We also need an area for the piglets, and one more for everyone else.”

“I can’t believe we have to split up the animals because the goats don’t get along with the pigs. We should force them to hang out together and just be friends.”

“You never know what’ll happen at the end of the eleven days,” I told her, laughing as I grabbed an extra piece of fencing to start splitting the place into three. It took Sophie and I about five minutes to decide how to best split up the area, and fifteen minutes later we had a beautifully set up petting zoo with three distinct sections where visitors and their children could come through and meet all the animals.

I made my way back to the truck. “All right everyone, your homes for the next twelve days are all set!” I said enthusiastically, and was met with a cacophony of questions.

“Awesome! A new home!”

“Why can’t we just go back to the farm?”

“Will there be hay?”

“Can I get an area where I can’t see the pigs?”

“How many people are coming to see us?”

“Is there Wi-Fi? Also, what’s Wi-Fi?”

Deciding I didn’t have the energy to answer all the questions, I opened the cage that held the chickens and carried them, two at a time, to their new home. Bee hissed as I walked past.

“You didn’t say there’d be farm animals here,” she scowled at me. She had settled into her bed and was now curled up into a little ball. Her complaint took the form of her looking up at me from this position, and as a result her voice was slightly muffled, which made her complaints seem a little bit more pathetic.

“Yes, Bee, what did you think a petting zoo was?”

“I thought it was just going to be me and the shelter animals,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize I’d be sharing my space with them,” she continued, looking at the chickens.

“Well, you can ignore them. Just like you do with everything else you don’t like.”

“Farm animals are loud. And annoying. So uncouth. Why can’t they be dignified, like I am?”

I rolled my eyes and forced myself not to answer that as I carried the chickens into their new enclosure.

“What does the cat know about dignity?” one of them asked the other. “I bet she doesn’t even lay her eggs in a box.”

I looked to make sure Bee hadn’t heard the comment, but thankfully it looked like she’d immediately gone to sleep after I’d walked away. Babysitting animals for twelve days was definitely not going to be a vacation, even though the vet clinic was closed during the festival. I still had my cell phone number up, in case of any emergencies. Sophie, having heard the conversation, grinned at me as she brought over two more of the chickens.

“Are things not going perfectly in animal-land?”

I sighed. “I swear, you are so lucky the only animal you can talk to is Sprinkles.”

Sprinkles was Sophie’s dog that she’d adopted after his owner had been murdered. Sophie’s mom was a witch, and while we all believed for years that Sophie had no magical powers whatsoever, we discovered that she could speak with Sprinkles. That was though, as it turned out, the limit to her magical abilities.

“All right, goats, your turn,” I said, moving toward their hutch.

“Good, we should get to go first. You hear that, son?” asked a large brown goat with white patches to a little white kid standing between its legs. “Goats are the most important animal. We always go first.”

The kid bleated his agreement, and I rolled my eyes. Obviously the mother goat hadn’t noticed that we had already loaded the chickens into the coop. This was going to be a long day.