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SCAREWILDPIGS

These latter summer nights as the rice heads richen, each time I zone up the mountain, just past the patch of forest where the wild pigs hide in wait for their chance to raid the rice fields, where you have to be careful going around the far curve because it's blinded by the bamboo that grows up and leans out over from the left, you get careful and cautious and watchful just as the headlights sweeping their arc around the curve suddenly starkly light upon a ghastly figure looming by the roadside, a kind of mad farm woman dressed to the nines in stylish hat and garish jacket of green on ivory with casual gray slacks, very casual gray slacks, in seeming danger of stepping right into the road: "Is she ill?" "What is she doing?" type thoughts flash panically through the driving-habituated mindzone grabbing the steering wheel trying to get a quick handle on this sudden dangerous apparition, this horrible creature with no legs, no face, no life you can see now as you draw carefully closer, and beyond her is her husband it would appear, moving closer, he as boneless, as faceless as she, though less stylish of dress from the discards someone in a farm household was willing to leave suddenly out in the rain on sticks like scarecrows, only to scare wild pigs away, bring the hearts of nighttime drivers, wending their ways up the dark curving road, abruptly into their mouths like this...