I noticed it in the morning, when the sun was just beginning to illuminate the yard with gold.
My little pig, Chester, was digging again. In the same spot, tirelessly, with a kind of stubborn zeal.
At first, I simply grinned. “Did he find treasure or something?” I said out loud, glancing at his pink back, glistening with dust. But day after day, he returned to that same spot, and the grin gradually gave way to alarm.
I tried to fill the hole—twice, three times. But in the morning, Chester was digging again, snorting and squealing, as if something was calling him from beneath the clay.
By the evening of the third day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I picked up the shovel.
He stood nearby, as if waiting for this moment, jerking his snout as I landed the first blow.
The earth was compact, gray, and damp. I dug for about ten minutes until the shovel struck something hard.
A dull sound was heard. I bent down, scraping away the dirt with my hands.
Fabric slipped under my fingers—dense, rough, faded with time. Blue.
A chill ran through my chest. This wasn’t trash or a bag. It was clothes.
I continued to carefully dig through the earth. A sleeve appeared beneath the fabric, then a bony wrist.
The world around me seemed to shrink to a point. There was silence in my ears, only Chester’s heavy breathing somewhere nearby.
I stepped back, my heart pounding as if it were trying to escape.
My fingers wouldn’t obey as I dialed the police.
“I… I found…” the words came out in fragments, “…a body. On my property.”
Then everything seemed to slow down. Sirens, footsteps, commands. Men in uniform surrounded the pit, exchanging glances.
Someone quietly said, “A woman. An old story.”
Later, I overheard conversations.
Many years ago, this house belonged to the Wilson family. The neighbors remembered—the wife disappeared suddenly, the husband said she had left, and soon sold the farm. The case was closed then.
Now everything fell into place.
I stood by the pen and looked at Chester. He grunted as usual, but there was something insistent, alive, in his eyes.
He sensed the truth before anyone else.
And I realized that sometimes even a simple animal can hear what a person doesn’t want to notice—a whisper of the past, a call from underground.
Now, when I pass that corner of the yard, I can still hear in my head the sound of the shovel meeting something hard, and Chester’s quiet snort – a reminder that secrets don’t stay buried forever.
