Pork in Stripes by Lydia Ship

Monday, February 15, 2010

Pigs in pinstripes, soft butterball faces, well-shaped hooves, sit behind the barriers, and tellers fan money coifed—come in, come in, to Parkfar Bank, where everyday a new customer receives a surprise.

Jule holds her Parkfar pen. Jule, a high school senior, eighteen and nervous in a scratchy housedress: “Mom and Dad brought me. It’s time, I guess.”

You and I and all of us have bank accounts and keep money there—it’s the American way, like having religion—no one thinks twice about it, and the pigs rely on this. But the bank is protected; our money is protected. In God and the Banks We Trust, or something like that, and stars and stripes and fields of grain.

Two months later, Jule is crying and won’t stop crying. She is confused. In a pinch, Jule’s mother used Jule’s debit card and deposited a check that evening to cover the amount. But the policy at Parkfar was to take a few days to process each check while debiting automatically, and as a result, Jule’s account was overdrawn by two dollars and her checks began bouncing. Parkfar charged Jule thirty dollars per bounced check. At the end of two weeks when Jule checked her account, Jule found she owed almost eight hundred dollars without actually having bought anything. She was in fake debt that was real. The bank told Jule that she was forgiven but she still owed three hundred sixty dollars. Jule earned five hundred dollars a month at the farm. The cost to Parkfar was seven dollars per bounced check. Will the pigs take a bow?

Ms. Clemens, one of the hairdressers in town, gave Jule a small job for cash and taught her how to send the money from working at the farm to a free internet savings account with a high interest rate. Jule kept her account at Parkfar open, though. Each day after school until high school graduation, Jule traveled to Parkfar to deposit five dollars. Each day she walked inside and looked at the pigs—pigs dim-eyed, full of whisker stench. The first day she trailed tiny staples along the carpeting—uh-oh, a teller’s accident. The next day she left a small baggie of cow poo in the restroom trashcan, covered in paper towels—oops, a dirty diaper. And so she would return, day after day—pouring vinegar on the deposit envelopes, dropping wads of chewed gum in the parking lot, staying just shy of crime—making sure her money was well-spent. All Jule really wants to know is what money means to Parkfar. She gives them a dollar, and what is that to them? Is it an exchange? Is it a lollipop? Is it a turnip? Is it a life? Is it nothing?

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Other stories by Lydia Ship have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, The 2^nd Hand, The Battered Suitcase, The Pedestal, Night Train, A Capella Zoo, The Armchair Aesthete, New South, Neon, and The Dead Mule, among others; in 2009, one of her stories received a Pushcart nomination, and she is a Contributing Editor at The Chattahoochee Review. Read more of her stories here.