LO! A Three Little Pigs Parable & A Most Startling Revelation

As published in The Daily Tremor, Vol. XXVIII

Dearest Gentle Reader,

The world will say you misunderstood the question.
You’ll know they simply feared your answer.

This tale, plucked from the younger years of our heroine Stella, is not one of debutantes or dowries, but of a small girl, a grand misunderstanding, and a congregation who would never forget her entrance.

Though our heroine is most certainly neurospicy, and ever dramatically literal, this particular story offers no scandal.

Only laughter.

The tender, awkward, bitter-sweet kind that blooms when one’s wiring does not match the world’s expectations, and when one has spent years negotiating identity in a world that doesn’t always make space for difference.

And so I bid you welcome: to a moment of lightness that carries its shadows, a story where humour and solitude walk hand in hand.

For those of us with peculiar minds and peculiar hearts, let this chapter serve as both mirror and reprieve.

Not every chapter in Hopeful Monster carries grief in its hands.

Some carry laughter; clumsy, honest, neurospicy laughter.

This is one of those chapters.

Let this report serve as joyful evidence that humour is not an escape from grief. It is often its companion, scribbling joy in the margins of misunderstood lives shaped by years of interrupted identity.

And if the tone feels unusually warm, dear reader, you may be onto something. We’ve been told that a certain Elusive Author has left faint fingerprints on this dispatch, barely perceptible, yet unmistakably hers…

Until the next tremor shakes the page.

 

The Editorial Board of The Daily Tremor
(Letterpress & Inkblot Division, and one suspiciously poetic ghost contributor)

The memory surfaced unexpectedly, bringing with it a smile that even her current troubles couldn’t dim…

She’d been about 5, sitting between her mother and Luna in church, actually paying attention for once. A miracle in itself that probably should’ve been reported to the Vatican.

Father Dominique was doing his sermon, reading from Mark 8:34. He had a flair for the dramatic, the kind that made you wonder if he’d missed his calling as a Shakespearean actor.

His voice boomed through the church: “Jesus looked out amongst them and asked, ‘who amongst ye shall follow me?'”

He looked up with the theatrical gravity of a stage actor who’d just spotted a critic in the third row, his sweeping gaze beseeching the congregation, and continued, in a disappointed tone, for emphasis: “Jesus asked, who will follow me? Come forth!”

Stella was shocked at the lack of show of hands, given the venue. She shot up from the pew with her hand raised high, sprinting toward the altar, singing “meeeeee!” with the enthusiasm of a game show contestant who’d just won a washing machine.

The silence that followed was absolute, the kind that only happens when an entire congregation is trying desperately not to laugh while simultaneously wondering if they’re going to hell for wanting to.

It wasn’t until she read Father Dominique’s startled face (a perfect blend of religious confusion and existential crisis) that she realised the question had been rhetorical.

Her blush had burned her cheeks as she stood there, mortified, a small part of her wondering why no one else was willing to step up.

After all, wasn’t the whole point of Sunday school to follow Jesus?

Talk about mixed messages.

From that day forward, she’d decided that God and she would figure out their relationship together: God helps those who help themselves, even if they occasionally misread the social cues about when, how, or what exactly that help required.

And who occasionally sprint to altars uninvited.

That wasn’t the first or last time her tendency to take things literally, her willingness to act when others hung back, and her ability to find meaning even in embarrassing moments had set her apart.

Being Stella felt like perpetually playing a game where everyone else had a rulebook she’d never received.

These days, Stella’s spirituality had little to do with church.

It was more about her own carefully constructed code, a system as precise as her morning rituals. She spent her days writing, saving half-drowned bees with sugar water (her appointed mission as the Bee ICU of Amalfi), nursing wounded birds back to health, and giving second chances to plants others had written off as dead.

St. Francis had animals; Stella had every living thing that had been told it didn’t fit in.

Suddenly, she thought of Francesca.

The smile that followed was bittersweet.

She wiped away a tear before it could settle.

She’d always liked to remember Francesca as her oldest friend, a childhood companion who had somehow endured the ‘chaos’ of being close to Stella.

A phantom of friendship. A role assigned.
Best friend since childhood.

Proof that she wasn’t too much. Proof that she could connect, that bonds could survive decades, careers, and the distance between Amalfi and Florence, where Francesca now practised as a neurosurgeon.

A phantom folded neatly into fifty years of assigning people roles they never actually played.

She remembered their last call.

Francesca was navigating a complex HR situation at the hospital. Office politics so Byzantine they made Game of Thrones look like Peppa Pig.

As they spoke, a parable came to Stella’s mind, something about Jesus teaching about building your house on rock, not sand.

Religious education finally coming in clutch after all these years.

In typical Stella fashion, she launched into what she believed was a perfect Biblical reference, explaining in spectacular detail how Jesus had taught about the importance of solid foundations through the story of three little pigs building their houses.

Her delivery carried the unshakable conviction of someone announcing that gravity pulls downward and that chocolate tastes better than broccoli: universal truths that simply shouldn’t need stating.

“And Francesca,” Stella had closed with loving certainty, “is Jesus ever wrong? He knew what he was talking about with those pigs and their houses.”

Silence.

For a moment, caught in certainty, Stella thought Francesca was genuinely reflecting on Jesus and the pigs. The lesson was the same, after all. Rock, not sand. Bricks, not straw.

Semantics.

Then Francesca burst into laughter.

The breathless, tear-wiping kind.

“Well,” Stella said, still not seeing what was so funny, “the principle is the same, isn’t it? Build your life on something solid. Jesus clearly plagiarised from the pigs, or the pigs from Jesus. But they both have a point!”

Her theological mashup finally dawned on her, making her laugh too.

The pigs, the rock, the sand, the straw, the wolf, the storm: all swirling together in perfect narrative harmony in Stella’s mind.

Why couldn’t anyone else see that Jesus and pigs were essentially delivering the same life lessons, she’d wondered.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

And that was Stella in a nutshell.

Someone who accidentally created some of the best theological remixes in history but never lost sight of what really mattered: the message at the heart of it all.

Over their school career, Francesca had seen all of Stella’s faces: the determined five-year-old with stories no one believed, the troubled teenager who sometimes arrived at school with vodka on her breath, trying to drown out her home life (and occasionally succeeding so well she’d answer Geography questions in French).

Francesca knew her better than anyone. Except Luna.

Or at least, that’s what she’d told herself for fifty years.

The truth was more complicated.

More devastating.

The way truth always is when you’ve spent a lifetime shaping your identity for the approval of others, or a way to hide your shame.

You create a mythology of connection.

She’d needed to believe that someone was there for her.

To prove she wasn’t alone.

That she was real.

So she’d written people into her story.

Given lines never spoken.

Created bonds that existed more in her mind than in reality.

The true cost of interrupted identity, of neurodivergent survival in a neurotypical world: sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference between the roles you’d pretended into being and the relationships that actually existed.

Different didn’t mean wrong. Different meant different.

And Stella knew nothing could erase from her heart that precious moment, that brief authentic connection, over the momentary belief that Jesus may actually have preached the gospel of the Three Little Pigs.

🐷 No pigs were harmed in the making of this moment.🐷