The Pigs I Made

The first man I turned into a pig absolutely deserved it.

So did the second. And the third. And, honestly, every single one after that.

I know how the stories make me sound. The evil witch on her island, luring sailors to their doom, transforming innocent men into swine for no reason except cruelty. But here’s the thing about stories: they’re usually told by the people who didn’t get turned into pigs. And those people have a vested interest in making the pig thing seem unreasonable.

It wasn’t unreasonable. It was, in fact, the most reasonable response to the situation.

Let me explain.

---

My name is Circe. I’m the daughter of Helios, the sun god, which sounds impressive until you realize what it actually means: I’m the daughter of a man so self-absorbed he literally spends all day staring at his own reflection in the ocean while driving a flaming chariot across the sky.

My mother was a nymph. I don’t remember much about her. She left when I was young, which is what nymphs do. They’re not built for motherhood. They’re built for being beautiful near bodies of water and occasionally sleeping with gods who should know better.

So I grew up in my father’s palace, surrounded by my siblings and cousins and the endless parade of minor deities who hung around hoping to catch some reflected glory. I was not beautiful. I was not talented. I was not any of the things that make a young goddess valuable in the halls of the Titans.

What I was, it turned out, was a witch.

---

I discovered my power by accident, the way you discover most important things.

There was a nymph named Scylla. Beautiful, cruel, the kind of woman who made sure everyone in the room knew exactly where they ranked and how far below her they’d landed. She’d been tormenting me for years, in the petty ways that immortals torment each other when they have eternity to fill and nothing better to do. Insults about my voice. Comments about my hair. Once she told an entire banquet hall that I smelled like a goat, and everyone laughed, and I sat there smiling because what else do you do when you’re the least powerful person in a room full of gods?

One day I’d had enough. I was standing by a tidal pool, grinding herbs for no particular reason, muttering under my breath about what I’d like to do to her if I could. The water started to glow. The herbs started to smoke. And suddenly I knew, with a certainty I’d never felt about anything, that if I poured this mixture into the water where Scylla bathed, she would become something else entirely.

So I did.

The next morning, Scylla went to her favorite bathing pool. The morning after that, she was a monster. Six heads, twelve legs, a ring of howling dogs fused around her waist. She lives in a strait now, snatching sailors off the decks of ships and eating them whole. It’s a whole thing.

I should have felt guilty. I didn’t. She’d spent two hundred years making me miserable, and now she ate people for a living. That seemed proportional to me.

But my family didn’t see it that way.

---

The thing about being a witch in a family of gods is that no one knows quite what to do with you.

Gods have domains. My father has the sun. My aunt has the moon. My cousins have rivers and forests and the abstract concept of victory. These are respectable powers. Predictable, categorizable, the kind of thing you can put on a family tree and feel good about.

Witchcraft isn’t like that. Witchcraft is messy. It’s herbs and potions and words spoken at midnight. It’s transformation without permission. It’s power that doesn’t come from your bloodline but from your knowledge, your practice, your willingness to reach into the fabric of reality and pull.

My father looked at me after the Scylla incident and saw something he couldn’t control. That scared him.

So he exiled me.

---

Aiaia is a small island in the middle of a sea no one sails if they can help it. It has forests, meadows, a spring of fresh water, and absolutely no company except the animals.

When I arrived, I thought I would die of loneliness. I was used to the crowded halls of my father’s palace, the constant noise of divine relatives bickering and boasting. The silence of Aiaia was crushing. Some nights I screamed just to hear a voice, even if it was only my own.

But here’s the thing about solitude. It’s like cold water. Terrible at first. Then you adjust. Then, eventually, you realize you prefer it.

I built a house. I planted a garden. I learned the properties of every herb on the island, which ones healed, which ones harmed, which ones could transform a living creature into something else entirely. I practiced my craft without anyone watching, without anyone judging, without anyone telling me I was doing it wrong or doing too much or doing things that goddesses shouldn’t do.

For the first time in my life, I was free.

I was also, I discovered, very good at what I did.

---

The first sailors arrived maybe fifty years after my exile. I’d lost track of time by then. Immortality does that to you. But I remember the day clearly. I was gathering herbs on the eastern shore when I saw the ship.

They were Greeks, blown off course by a storm. Twelve men, ragged and hungry, looking at my island like it was salvation.

I should have been happy. After fifty years alone, I should have welcomed them with open arms, grateful for any company at all.

But something in the way they looked at my house, my beautiful house that I’d built with my own hands, made me uneasy. Something in the way they looked at me.

"A woman alone," one of them said. "No husband? No father?"

"No."

"Then who protects this place?"

"I do."

They laughed. All twelve of them, laughing at the idea of a woman alone protecting anything.

"We’ll stay for a while," the leader said. It wasn’t a request. "Rest up, take on supplies. You don’t mind, do you?"

I minded very much. But I’d been raised in my father’s palace, where women didn’t say no to men, where hospitality was sacred, where refusing a guest was worse than almost anything.

So I let them in.

---

They stayed for three days. In that time, they ate my food, drank my wine, tracked mud through my clean floors, and made comments about my body that I tried very hard not to hear.

On the second night, two of them cornered me in the garden.

"You must be lonely," one said. "Out here all by yourself."

"I manage."

"We could help with that." He stepped closer. His breath smelled like wine and something rotten. "Pretty thing like you, wasted on an empty island."

I thought about Scylla. About the herbs in my garden, the words I knew, the power that lived in my hands.

"I think," I said carefully, "that you should go back to the house."

"I think," he said, mimicking my tone, "that you don’t get to give orders."

His hand closed around my wrist.

And that’s when I discovered what pigs look like when they’re surprised.

---

Let me be clear about something: the transformation isn’t painful. Or at least, it doesn’t seem to be. One moment you’re a man grabbing a woman who told you no. The next moment you’re a pig, rooting around in the mud, wondering vaguely what happened to your hands.

The men kept their minds. That was a choice I made deliberately. They knew who they were. They knew what they’d done. They just couldn’t do anything about it anymore.

The other ten sailors woke to find their companions had become swine overnight. They ran for their ship so fast they left half their supplies behind.

I let them go. I could have transformed them too, but I wanted someone to tell the story. I wanted other sailors to know what happened to men who came to my island and forgot how to behave.

Word spread. The stories started. And the men kept coming anyway.

---

That’s the thing that surprised me. They kept coming.

You’d think, after the first few crews got turned into pigs, the message would get through. You’d think sailors would learn to avoid my island, or at least to be polite if they ended up there.

But no. They kept coming. And they kept behaving exactly the same way.

"We’re not like those other men," they’d say, right before proving they were exactly like those other men.

"I’m sure you have your reasons," they’d say, cornering me by the wine jars, "but I’m different."

Different. Every single one of them thought he was different. And every single one of them ended up in my sty with the others, learning what it felt like to be a body that couldn’t say no.

After a while, it became almost routine. Ship arrives. Men disembark. I offer them food and wine, drugged by this point because I’d learned not to wait for them to show their true colors. They eat, they drink, they start to make their comments, and then. Pigs.

Some people might call that a trap. I call it efficiency.

---

The sty got crowded over the years. I had hundreds of pigs at my peak. Sailors from a dozen different nations, merchants and warriors and the occasional prince who thought his title would protect him.

It didn’t. Princes make the same sounds as peasants when they’re rooting for acorns.

I treated them well, actually. Plenty of food, clean water, room to roam in the forest. I wasn’t cruel. I just didn’t let them be human anymore, because I’d learned what they did with their humanity when they had it.

Some nights I’d walk through the sty and look at them. These men who’d thought they could take whatever they wanted, reduced to snouts and hooves and grunting. I’d think about all the women they must have encountered before they met me. Women without witchcraft. Women who couldn’t say no and have it mean something.

I was doing a service, really. Taking these men out of circulation. Protecting every woman they’d never get the chance to hurt.

That’s what I told myself, anyway. And mostly, I believed it.

---

Odysseus changed things. I hate admitting that, but it’s true.

He arrived the same way all the others did. Ship blown off course, men stumbling onto my shore. I went through my usual routine. Food, wine, drugs, transformation.

But Odysseus wasn’t with the first group. He’d stayed behind on the ship, suspicious, and when his men didn’t return, he came looking for them alone.

Alone. Armed with nothing but a sword and a flower some god had given him. Moly, the herb that blocks my magic.

He walked into my house, ate my food, drank my wine, and didn’t transform.

I tried three times. Nothing. He just sat there, watching me with those clever eyes, and when I raised my wand for a fourth attempt, he drew his sword and put it to my throat.

"Witch," he said. "I think we need to have a conversation."

---

Here’s what I didn’t expect: he didn’t hurt me.

He could have. He had the sword, the immunity, the righteous anger of a man whose crew had been transformed into swine. By all the laws of gods and men, he was entitled to my head.

But he didn’t take it. He lowered the sword and said, "I’m not going to kill you. I just want my men back."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why not kill me? I turned your crew into pigs. Most men would consider that a killing offense."

"Most men are idiots." He sheathed his sword. "I’ve been traveling for years. I’ve seen monsters and gods and things I can’t even name. If I killed everyone who did something terrible, I’d never stop killing." He looked around my house. The herbs hanging from the ceiling, the potions on the shelves, the evidence of a lifetime of solitary practice. "Besides, I have a feeling you had your reasons."

I stared at him. In two hundred years of sailors, not one of them had ever said that.

"I’ll turn them back," I heard myself say. "But first, let me tell you about those reasons."

---

We talked for hours.

I told him about Scylla, about my exile, about the first sailors and what they’d tried to do. I told him about the hundreds of men I’d transformed and why. I told him things I’d never told anyone, because there’d never been anyone to tell.

He listened. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t argue, didn’t try to explain to me how I’d misunderstood or overreacted. He just listened, and when I was done, he was quiet for a long moment.

"That’s terrible," he said finally. "What they did. What they tried to do."

"Yes."

"But you know not all of them deserved it. Some of them were just men. Following orders, going along with the group. Not good, but not—"

"Not what? Not the ones who cornered me in the garden? Not the ones who said they were different?" I laughed, and it came out bitter. "They weren’t different, Odysseus. They were all the same. Given the opportunity, they would have done the same things."

"Maybe." He looked at me steadily. "Or maybe some of them wouldn’t have. And you never gave them the chance to prove it."

I didn’t have an answer for that.

---

He stayed for a year.

Not as a prisoner. I’d turned his men back, given them food and shelter, made it clear they were free to leave whenever they wanted. But Odysseus chose to stay, and his men stayed with him, and for twelve months I had something I’d almost forgotten existed: company.

It wasn’t what I expected. I’d been alone so long I’d forgotten how to share space with anyone. The noise bothered me, the constant presence of bodies in rooms I was used to having empty. The men were polite, because Odysseus had made it very clear what would happen if they weren’t, but they were still there, and sometimes I wanted to scream just to have silence again.

But there were other moments. Meals together, conversations that went late into the night. Odysseus was clever in ways that surprised me, thoughtful in ways that seemed impossible for a man who’d spent his life at war.

We became lovers. That surprises people who’ve heard the stories. How could I sleep with a man after everything men had done to me? But it’s simpler than it sounds. I wasn’t afraid of men. I was angry at them. And Odysseus had done something none of the others had: he’d treated me like a person.

After two hundred years of being treated like a thing to be used, person was more than enough.

---

He left, eventually. They always do.

His wife was waiting for him. Had been waiting for twenty years. And Odysseus, whatever else he was, loved her. I couldn’t compete with that. I didn’t want to.

The morning he sailed away, I stood on the cliff and watched until his ship disappeared over the horizon. Then I went back to my house, my garden, my animals.

The pigs were still there. I hadn’t turned them back. Odysseus had only bargained for his own men, and the others had been pigs for so long I wasn’t sure they even remembered being human.

I let them out of the sty. Let them roam the island, root in the forests, live whatever pig lives they could manage. I didn’t make any more after that. Didn’t feel the need to.

Odysseus had changed something in me. Not fixed, because I was never broken, but shifted. I stopped being so angry. Started being something closer to peaceful.

---

The years went by. Centuries, eventually. The world changed around me in ways I could feel but not quite see. Wars rising and falling, empires growing and crumbling, the age of heroes giving way to something smaller and quieter.

Sailors still came sometimes. I didn’t transform them anymore. Just sent them on their way with food and water and a warning about the rocks to the east. Some of them were grateful. Some of them were confused. A few were angry, like they’d heard the stories and come specifically for the witch, and were disappointed to find only a woman living alone with her herbs.

I didn’t owe them the witch. I didn’t owe them anything.

But I understood, finally, what Odysseus had meant. Not all of them deserved to be pigs. Some of them were just men. Flawed, foolish, capable of violence but also capable of something better, if you gave them a minute to find it. The ones who couldn’t find it? I still had the wand. The sty was empty, but it didn’t have to stay that way.

Mostly, though, I let them pass through unchanged. Given the chance to prove themselves, most of them did. That was the surprising thing. It was almost enough to restore my faith in humanity.

Almost.

---

I’m still here. Still on Aiaia, still tending my garden, still practicing the craft I’ve had millennia to perfect. The island doesn’t appear on any maps. Ships don’t find it unless the sea wants them to, and the sea has gotten pickier over the centuries.

But I’m not lonely. That’s the part the stories always get wrong. They imagine me pining away on my island, desperate for company, cursed to an eternity of solitude as punishment for my witchcraft.

I chose this. Every day I choose it again. The silence, the herbs, the animals, the slow rhythm of a life lived on my own terms. Some days I miss conversation. Some days the quiet feels heavy. But those days pass. And when they’re over, I’m still here. Still free, still dangerous, still myself in a way I never got to be when I was surrounded by people who wanted me to be something else.

Those men came to my island. They ate my food, slept under my roof, and then they decided I was something to use. They decided that a woman alone meant a woman unprotected. They decided that what they wanted mattered more than the word no.

I gave them exactly what they gave me. A body they couldn’t control. Desires they couldn’t act on. A form that matched what they’d already shown themselves to be.

At least pigs are honest about what they are.

They can call it witchcraft if they want. I call it survival.