“Today was the day. No more putting it off. No more beating around the bush.”

Jaimie whispered this encouragingly to herself as she stood, her back to the administrative building she’d just walked out of. Taking a moment to steady her breathing – and to crack her knuckles, a luxury she’d been denied for months on end – she picked up her suitcase, turned 180 degrees, and walked straight back in, her every step oozing determination.

The building was dedicated to a secret commune, one of many, for animal roleplaying enthusiasts. Here there were wildlife preserves which were filled with both willing participants and “volunteered” slaves taking upon the lifestyles and nature-determined duties of various animals, both as predator and prey. There were also farms, zoos, even circuses traveling incognito, whose stock of animals were in actually humans who’d signed up for a new life of fur and feathers, tooth and claw. And Jaimie had until that morning been one of them.

Years ago, more than she cared to think of, rumors and whispers had led her to one such commune. Seeking a new life away from a career juggling meaningless paperwork (and anonymity from family members who could barely manage their own lives, much less hers), she’d gleefully signed the contract for “residency,” and waited with bated breath for training as a proud showpony, a loyal hound, or perhaps even a roaring circus lion.

She expected that as that were the options she had checked on her induction papers. Sadly, those had proven to be treated as merely “suggestions” from members signing into the program. The reality that a combination of her physical exam and luck of the draw was what determined her fate. As a result, she’d found herself assigned to one of the commune’s farms as a wretched piggygirl, which was next-to-last rung if not the very bottom of the animal roleplaying ladder. Her grand new life was to be spent wallowing in a mud hole with other unlucky participants, rolling in the foul-smelling mix to keep flies and the burning sunshine off.

Foul smells and indignity were only the beginning, however, as all animal-slaves -- or livestock -- assigned to farms had to work for their living. Cowgirls, for example, had their breasts stimulated and were milked, their secretions dehydrated and sold in supermarkets as baby formula. Piggygirls and boarboys, however, suffered a far less laudable duty, as they were essentially living garbage converters.

Schools, hotels, hospitals, and restaurants had unfinished or spoiled food trucked away to the farm, believing it all went on a compost heap somewhere. In reality, the grotesque fare – expired milk, spoiled meat and vegetables, unfinished meals, even used coffee grounds – all went to the pig troughs of the farm, where it was to be consumed by Jaimie and hew fellow human swine. What came out the other end, as the pig-slaves freely crapped into their mud hole, was every other day drained away and taken to be treated and sold as fertilizer like most livestock manure.

Of course, the food – so-called – was treated with drops of iodine to kill harmful bacteria, just as survivalists did with water collected in the wild. And yes, Jaimie and her fellows received semi-regular injections of antibiotics and other medicine into their stomachs as a safety precaution. That didn’t do anything, however, to change the fact that the smell was intolerable, the food sour at best, the consistency often verging on slimy. But ate they did; they’d signed contracts to serve as 24/7 slaves for a year or more each, and the farmhands were free to treat them like any ornery animal on a regular farm.

That had been Jaimie’s life for a year, as she wallowed in the mud and eating food not fit for criminals by day, and by night all huddled together for warmth against the freezing cold with dozens of her fellow naked slaves. It was only here that another illusion she’d carried -- that of guiltless, anonymous sex, rutting together like, well, animals – came to life at all, as in the darkness, the penis of some frustrated, horny, half-asleep boar would slip into her pussy, or occasional up her ass. Most disappointingly, this was not always actual sex, but rather the poor bastard simply trying to keep his dick from freezing off.

Jaimie had suffered through this for six months, then her contract had expired. Showered and cleaned, her first contact with warm water and soap in her entire time at the farm, she was brought to the administration building. Laughingly, she was offered the chance to reenlist with the farm, to continue her life as human livestock, but now for a full year. Quite a few years in fact.

And, in a supreme example of “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” she’d reenlisted.

Jaimie had foolishly gotten into her head that the whole pig situation had merely been an introductory program, that she would be reassigned as something with some dignity and poise…

And had wound up eating someone else’s trash, yet again.

That day had been the end of her contract with the farm. As before, she been pulled out from the mud, given a quick shower, and again been presented before one of the farm’s office-workers. On the wall behind the counter, she saw where a calendar proudly announced that it was the 1st of January. The beginning of a whole new year, with an infinite number of directions in which to go.

Inspired by the sight, she locked eyes with the graying old man with his pen at the ready, and matter-of-factly, and with cold steel in her voice, had told him that she would not be signing up again. For all the fire she’d felt had been reflected in her eyes, the man had shrugged and, stamping some papers in a folder with her name on it, pointed the direction of the clean-up room and given her a key to a deposit box with her personal effects in them.

And now here she was, less than an hour later, marching right back into the lion’s den.

“But this time,” she told herself, “this time, things are going to be different. I am not going back to square one with a deadend job and an army of relatives who all think they’re my lifestyle coordinator. I’ve put too much into this place, and now it’s time to get something out of it. It’s a new year, and damn it, I am going to be a whole new person by the time it’s over!”

To be frank, she was also rather embarrassed with the way she looked. Her hair had been regularly shaved into a thatch of bristles on her pate, like a crude crewcut. And then there were her clothes. Nothing had happened to them in storage, but they might as well have shrunk in the wash.. Jaimie had been no ballet dancer when she came to this place, and years of lying around in the mood eating food, whatever state it was in, all day, hadn’t done too much for her figure. She felt like an overstuffed sausage as she marched along on her thick, sturdy ankles.

* * *

“For gawd’s sake, shet up about it,” the office worker snapped in a Texan drawl (which will not be continued from here on) as he stepped into the breakroom, as a younger clerk, snickering, followed him in.

“What’s what, Boss?” a farmhand already on his lunch break asked as the two ambled in. In truth, the elder office worker wasn’t really the chief administrator of the farm, but he’d been there for some years, made most of the decisions (or at least saw that they were passed on from above) and, well, the farmhand had been told to respect his elders.

“‘Boss’ here,” the new guy said, “was browbeaten by a sowcunt whose time had just come up into signing her back on, but as a horse!”

“I was not--! Okay, stop” the old man said, mostly to himself, a she calmed down. “Yes, she got into my face about it, but I was not browbeaten, and she did not force her way onto a ponygirl program.”

“Oh, of course not. Nooo,” the younger clerk agreed mockingly.

The farmhand glanced at his boss inquiringly, wondering just what he did do that had the greenhorn all fired up.

“Now, she is the human equine division,” he admitted, “but as a mule. A pack mule. That oughta toss some water on her coals,” he muttered.

“I gotta see this,” the farmhand said, as he pulled a smartphone out of his back pocket. “Technology is a wonderful thing,” he said to himself as he connected to the farm’s CCTV system, and clicked his way into the equine division. After a few second scrolling from one camera to the next, he found what he guessed was their latest addition.

“Mmmph,” he grunted. “Not the best we ever selected, but could be worse,” giving points to each of his fellows.

“No, she’s not,” the junior file clerk said, shaking his head a little sadly. “But she came in, saying how she’d tried playing by the system, looking for a promotion” – he stopped and shook his head again, as if to ask how she could have gotten such an idea – “and now she’s just going to sign into straight what she wanted, which was to be a proud, prancing pony,” he ended, with a melodramatic lilt to his voice.

Looking at the screen, the farmhand agreed that such a demand should have been refused out right. And yet, there she was, a rather flabby woman – late twenties to mid-thirties – freshly decked out in the general equine garb. “For all the difference that it made,” he thought.

In many ways, it was actually quite similar to a sow’s tack: a leather corset that bared her breasts (which were kind of drooping), a headband adorned with lozenge-shaped strips of leather to represent animal ears, and hoof-gloves that she kept pulled up to her chest. The latter were brown rather than pink, but other than that, there were only two real differences that what a pig-slave wore.

First, instead of standing on her knees, she was now tottering hoof-boots, ballet boots with cloven hoof-like soles. Secondly, the prosthetic pig-nose was gone, leaving her face unadorned aside from the horse bridle now stuffed into her mouth and strapped around her head, the reins resting where they’d been tossed over her shoulders.

“But not by much,” the elder clerk admitted, running his hand through his thinning hair, which reminded the farmhand another difference, the girl’s almost bare scalp as opposed to a long, loose mane.

“All these zoo-fantasy weirdoes, thinking they can come and live out their fantasy of being a human horse, or a dog,” the younger clerk spoke up, his tone no longer all that alight with his mentor’s gaff. “Fox, eagle, beluga whale, or whatever.

“And yes, that last one is real, believe it or not,” he added as an aside as he took a deep drink from a soda bottle he’d gotten from a machine.

“It’s a buyer’s market for the communes; we can get who we want for whatever role we have that needs filling. All these… extras that come along just have to make do with what we have to assign them, and if they don’t like it, they can leave when their time is up. And trust me, they don’t always like it,” he finished, sniffing disdainfully, although at the foolish demands of their charges or at his coworker’s actions, it could only be guessed.

The farmhand nodded as his comments. The pig-slaves and the duties they had to provide for the farm was proof enough, but there were others. Supposedly the nature preserve-motif communes had forests filled all-female doe-slaves, who were constantly on the run from all-male packs of wolf-slaves. If a wolf-boy caught a doe-girl, he dragged his “kill” back to the wolves’ den, where the poor slave was thoroughly gang-banged throughout the night, released back into the wild only to repeat the process all over again if she hadn’t learned to be quicker, or her luck hadn’t changed. If by chance, a slave given doe status had hormones that orbited around rape fantasies, then she was in hog heaven; if she didn’t, then so sad, too bad, at least until her contract was up.

“And since it is, as you say, a buyer’s market,” the elder clerk spoke up, waking the farmhand from his silent musings, “I placed our little friend in a nice, out of the way post where she can either get a taste of what she wants while not embarrassing us, or finally learn that wanting is not so great a thing as having.”

“How can giving in and making her a ponygirl get her out of sight?” the farmhand asked. Ponygirls and ponystuds were more often than not serving in races, pulling the commune’s real clientele around in carriages, helping to plow the fields, and other duties that kept them out in the open.

The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Who said anything about making her a pony? I reassigned her to the equine division, and said so to her. Nothing about being a pony though. Take another look, young fella.”

Glancing back at his smartphone, the farmhand saw that ex-piggygirl was still being prepped for her new role. However, instead of a leather horse’s mask, she was now having a large rucksack strapped to her back. “What’s that for?” he wondered.

As if hearing his thoughts, the old man said, “That’s for carrying picks, shovels, water canteens, a tent, the standard gear for camping and prospecting.”

Both the farmhand and the younger clerk’s ears both perked at that. Some of their richer clients paid to go on recreations of gold prospecting tours of some of the more remote valleys and canyons. It was heavy, exhausting work for the animal-slaves assigned to it, which were not pony-slaves, a fact both saw fit to remind the elder administrator, speaking over one another. Despite the confused babble, he understood them perfectly as his face broke into a smile.

“No, but mule-slaves are a different matter.”

That shut both of them up, as the farmhand looked at the ex-piggygirl again on the tiny computer screen. She lacked the long legs and graceful shape for a ponygirl, but she was stout, had fat reserves to burn, and as a pig-slave had dealt with discomfort and turmoil as her daily bread… so to speak. And besides, horses, mules, deer, it all fell under the communes’ overarching ungulate roleplay guidelines.

“Y’know,” the farmhand said slowly, “she might make a fine mulecunt, after all. But I don’t think she’ll be very pleased with you playing semantics on her like that.”

“So what if she does?” the old man said rather defensively. Calming down again, he added, “Besides, it’s not as if I can plunk her down into gait training, not with the shape she’s in. Nope, a couple years trekking back in and forth into the old mining areas will tighten her up nice, I should think.”

“And when that’s done?” the younger clerk asked. “If she’s shaped up from all that strenuous work?”

“Or dropped dead from heatstroke?” the farmhand wondered, privately. Aloud, he asked if he would honor her request then.

In response, the old man just shrugged. “Maybe, baby… I’ll be tru-uu-uue,” he said, with an attempt at a sing-songy twang in his voice. The farmhand and his coworker both just looked at him in confusion.

“That was a song lyric, from ‘Maybe, Baby’. I guess it’s a bit of an oldie these days.”

The farmhand nodded his head in realization. Beside him, the younger clerk did the same, adding, “So, it’s, like from Aeromsith, or somebody like that?”

Sputtering the coffee he was drinking at that remark, the elder office statesman muttered something about needing more mule-slaves as he stalked out of the breakroom.

Watching him as he left, the clerk turned to the farmhand, shaking his head. “Kinda feeling bummed about the piggygirl, now. I saw her when she burst back into the office… got the feeling that becoming something other than a less-than-glorified shit machine was her dream. Hell, maybe it was her New Year’s resolution.”

“Well, that’s a big tradition,” the farmhand agreed, looking at the mulecunt on his device again, as one of his fellows swatted her with a cane to get her to stand still as a pickaxe was added to her increasingly overstuffed backpack. “And there’s no bigger tradition than breaking a new year’s resolution.”

Turning the smartphone off, he picked his coffee back up and took a sip, sighing contently at the rich flavor.

THE END