You had two choices after graduation: the power plant or the slaughterhouse. And the power plant usually wasn’t hiring. Those were good union jobs, hard to come by. Your dad had to be a foreman, or your last name had to be Johnson.

So instead most everyone got their yearbook portrait taken, cut school on the chosen day at the end of the semester, threw back warm beer from a half-empty keg at someone’s party, snorted something white or swallowed a couple pills, and by a Monday in mid-June was waking up at 5 AM and getting home after dark reeking of pig blood.

That was how it worked in Pigtown. Most everyone smelled like blood.

Jake put in his application the week after graduation. I waited in line right behind him, watched him kick at the dust on the sidewalk in his work boots while I tried to wake myself up.

Looking back, it seems like everyone was always trying to get you to wake up when you didn’t want to: six in the morning for the school bus on a Tuesday, practice for JV on the weekends at the crack of dawn even when you didn’t stand a chance of making varsity. If there was one thing we wished for, besides going on a trip somewhere like Cancun and never coming back, it was more sleep.

“You can’t sleep all day.”

“Why do you want to sleep your life away?”

“Get up.”

But maybe I did want to sleep my life away. That unrelenting refrain, and all my body wanted to do was ignore it. Just sleep more. Just sleep until something—anything—was over.

The line at the slaughterhouse was just that—a line—and everyone in it was hired, because the factory had already gotten a headcount of graduating seniors from Washington High and promoted just enough of last year’s graduates to the carving line so that each new eighteen-year-old could take up a place in the first couple rooms of the building where the newbies started.

Everyone already knew what they were in for.

I spent my hour in line staring at the back of Jake’s head. June was hot that year; his tight black curls stuck to his scalp with sweat just like his black t-shirt clung to his shoulder blades. He didn’t ever do much in gym class, mostly just hung around the walls during kickball, but had a natural lithe muscle that embraced his upper arms with tight cord.

We moved forward at the same time like we were dancing. His turn with the foreman just anticipated mine. When I gripped the pen to sign my contract, I thought about how the last fingers on it before had been his and how our hands were now tied together in signatures and soon would be tied together in the process of killing.

We both started on Monday on the kill floor.

*     *     *
This is how it works.

The hogs are brought in grunting and squealing. Don’t let anyone tell you they don’t know what’s happening; they know.

An eighteen-year-old drags a hog forward onto the floor.

Then the eighteen-year-old takes a set of electrified scissor tongs and positions them on the pig’s head.

Then the eighteen-year-old holds the tongs in place while a current induces a grand mal seizure in the pig. This is called electronarcosis.

Then another eighteen-year-old winches the pig into the air to bleed it out before it comes to.

Then some more eighteen-year-olds scald the pig’s body until the hair comes loose and the scurf comes off.

Then another couple eighteen-year-olds put the pig in the dehairing machine.

Then another eighteen-year-old hangs the pig from its gambrel tendons and scoops out its viscera.

Then another eighteen-year-old wielding an enormous knife like a machete slices the carcass in two.

The next day, some nineteen-year-olds carve the sides into cuts.

Then some hairnetted twenty- and thirty-year-olds seated at an assembly line package the meat with Styrofoam and plastic wrap and expiration date stickers.

Then an old trucker drives bacon and chops to the store.

*     *     *
The first day is hard. But everyone says you get used to it. And everyone is pretty much right.

I thought getting up to catch the school bus taught me what it meant to be tired. I didn’t know tired until I was stumbling home smelling blood on my boots, too exhausted to clean it off before falling into dreamless sleep.

This is how it worked, and it always worked like this, and it was just a matter of getting used to it, because you’d signed the contract and there might be rent to make or an engagement ring to save up for or god forbid a baby already on the way. You didn’t want to be destitute for the little one, did you? Who was going to pay for the diapers if not you?

I didn’t want to, but I got used to it. I thought Jake had, too.

Since we started at exactly the same time, we were assigned adjoining lockers. We didn’t talk much—Jake didn’t talk to anyone, as far as I knew, except maybe the other guys who played in his metal band, but he seemed to be pretty much the same as ever, by which I mean quiet.

His job was bringing the hogs in from the truck and standing them up next to the stunner station. But despite the inherent cruelty of our actions, there was still a gentleness in his bearing, his hands guiding the pigs with something approaching tenderness, maybe like how he cradled his guitar with delicacy even when the sounds coming out of it were augurs of death and decay.

A few weeks in, when I was used to the smell and so I assumed he was too, I saw something pretty weird.

Jake had already led five or so pigs in that morning, one after the other affixed the headgear to them, let the current run its course. Just a couple weeks of practice and his movements were already efficient and fluid.

I was scrubbing the paddles on the dehairing machine and couldn’t get my limbs to work like his; bristles stuck in my knuckles no matter how much I washed them. I looked up to gauge when the next one was coming and saw Jake drag a pig in and pause.

If anyone else had told me what they saw, I would have said they lied. But I saw it myself.

This one was just like any other hog: overfattened, destined for the slaughter, its eyes weary and agitated, its knees buckling under its pink bulk. Jake’s hands gripped the pig’s shoulders like they gripped every pig’s shoulders, but then he looked down and froze.

Everyone else was attending to their requirements: the blood, the intestines, the boiling hot water. No one else saw what I saw.

Carefully, with great sobriety, Jake dropped to first one knee and then the other, keeping both hands on the pig’s back. And then, face to face with the pig, Jake knelt before it and gazed into its eyes.

Sun streaming in from the windows eight feet above the floor turned the hell of the abattoir into a mouthpiece of heaven, a treasure chest of divine luminescence. The two of them stood in place, there, looking at one another as though they saw, they really saw, each other. It was like nothing else was in that room, no one else, just the two of them, the world melted away, the floor gone diamonds, the walls turned to clouds.

It was a mystery, how no one else saw, how everyone’s back was turned but mine, how the slaughterhouse turned into a cathedral in that moment, how no one else saw it, how every sound turned briefly to singing, how the blood cascading down the floor drains became rubies, how the knots of intestines all turned to strings of pearls, how the plastic shorn from rolls was sheets of crystal, how the hair in the paddles was spun gold, how the carcasses all were halves of Fabergé enamel eggs.

In the middle of that golden moment Jake stood again and led the pig from the room back outside. Once the steel door closed, the vision ended. The other workers turned around and bustle returned to the killing floor. Another hog fell over, stunned, and was lifted in the air to bleed out over one of the multiple drains that perforated the tile.

Jake didn’t come back until after break. He smelled so strongly of struck matches and damp dirt that it permeated even my blood-dulled nostrils. I didn’t ask him what happened to the pig.

For the moment, I forgot what I’d seen. It was easy to shove it away; it didn’t mesh with the rest of my day and the rest of my other days, and so it slid to the side like a bill unpaid. I left it there, stuck in a reused gas company envelope with a plastic window.

And there it would have stayed if it hadn’t been for Jake’s continual fuck-ups.

*     *     *
I got the sense that he tried to hide it for a bit. Like on break he took an entire pack of Camels outside instead of just one so that he’d have an excuse to be gone for fifteen or twenty minutes instead of seven.

Or like he pretended to leave his lunch in his truck everyday so that he had reason to slip from the cafeteria for half an hour and come back right when his shift was starting.

The breaks he took were getting too frequent. Fifteen minutes several times a day adds up, even when you’re good at your job. People started talking.

Jake, I wanted to say at the lockers, you’ve got to watch out. I’m saying this as your friend.

But it just came out as asking for a cigarette or the time. It was never the right moment. The bell rang before I could wet my lips.

So one day at lunch I snuck out behind him right as the door shut, the bottom of it catching the worn rubber on my sneakers.

The sun’s afternoon glare bouncing up from the parking lot burned my corneas until I shaded my eyes with a hand. I caught a glimpse of Jake disappearing to the side of the building; for someone who never lifted a finger in gym, he was fast.

I just managed to stick a foot through a frame around the corner before the dusty steel door slammed back into place. I hadn’t ever noticed this portion of the compound; it didn’t seem like it had been in use for years.

There weren’t any light switches in the stairwell and my eyes needed time to adjust. I crept downward, one hand dragging along the wall for support, until there were no more steps to descend, just dirt floor and a hole in the wall with a plank of wood half covering it. I slid it to the side and crawled in.

Mostly I expected to discover something like a blazing furnace with a murderer’s ghost shoving coal into its mouth, or maybe some vile experiments tied to rows of beds. Instead, I saw Jake and the pig.

The room was warm, cozy even. A worn synthetic rug thick on the floor. A couple low tables covered with lit candles. Band posters stuck on the walls. The hog from the killing floor lying there under a fleece blanket, a few empty food dishes to its side. I mean, I think it was that hog; they all looked the same to me. That’s the thing, there wasn’t anything special about this pig. It had whiskers and soggy ears, liver-colored spots on its pink coat, a broad damp nose.

Jake knelt by the pig, brushing its bristles and stroking its chin and speaking in low tones I couldn’t understand.

I coughed and Jake’s head snapped up.

“What do you want?” he asked. It was the longest sentence I’d heard from him since we started at the slaughterhouse.

I didn’t really know what I wanted. “I just wanted to … to see what you’d been doing?”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jake said. “You can’t let anybody take her away.”

“But why is she here?” I asked.

Jake sighed. “She tells me things. When I brought her to the floor, she told me to take the scissors off her head. She told me that if I did that, she’d tell me things I didn’t know. And she has. She’s told me a lot of things. You only get to know them if you’ve been as close as she has to the beginning and the end.”

Well, I thought. Well.

The pig grunted and stretched out its neat little hooves.

Jake laid his head on the ground next to her and looked into her eyes.

“I’ll tell you some of them,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the wonders of mud and rain, about babies that come squealing into existence in a rush of blood, about the animal heat that rises from a knot of beings, about how everything—everything—lives to dream. I’ll tell you what she’s told me because it’s so much more than anything we’ve heard before.”

“She’s a hog, Jake. She doesn’t know anything. She’s meant for meat.”

“We’re all meant for meat,” he said. “But when we sleep, we’re something else.”

When I got into bed that night, I wished for sleep not just from exhaustion but to try to understand what Jake meant.

*     *     *
Of course I didn’t tell anyone. But the fuck-ups kept building.

It’s not like I was friends with any of the other guys; they pretty much ignored me like they had in school. But exactly because they didn’t pay me much attention, they felt free to talk around me like I didn’t exist. That’s why I heard all the chatter before Jake did.

I mean, there were the usual gay jokes, you wouldn’t expect anything else, but then the tenor turned to something a little more sinister.

Everyone had heard a story somewhere about a cousin or an uncle and how they spent a little too much time with the pigs, if you know what I mean, that pink flesh, that bit that if you squinted long enough started to look like something else.

And maybe it’s only natural, because these animals are meat, and so, too, are all of us, when you get down to it, all our yearning to eat and screw and kill all of a piece, all pieces of us that gel in adolescence and by the time your hormones calm down and you can start to see it all a little clearer you’re already spending your days in the slaughterhouse.

So it’s not like those guys were totally ostracized, more that they clarified something that was supposed to stay murky, and then everyone’s girlfriends started thinking about it, and that’s when the problems started.

Jake, everyone decided, posed a problem. That problem needed to get solved.

I followed him again a couple weeks later as he slid into the stairway and down to the depths where the hog slept. I’d started to get the sense that he never really went home anymore. His clothes smelled ranker; not the slow accumulation of blood that eventually won’t worm its way out even in the hot cycle, but like he wasn’t really showering at all.

When I entered the little candlelit dirt chapel, he was lying next to the pig staring into her eyes. He looked thinner, more translucent. She looked the same.

“So what,” he mumbled after a few minutes of my standing over him, “so what if I’m sleeping here. She gives me bigger dreams.”

“Jake,” I said, “I’m pretty sure everyone knows something’s up. You need to get rid of her.”

His eyes lit on fire. “What the fuck do you mean? She’s not a possession. She’s a living fucking being. I can’t get rid of her. That’s not my right.”

“You’re gonna lose your job. She’s going to die anyway.”

Jake hissed wordlessly and turned back to the pig.

Before I left, I glanced at them one more time.

The two of them lay there, facing one another, eyes closed, silent. The air between them crackled and spat like electricity ran through it. Sparks burst like tiny fireworks, illuminating the crumbling walls. And I felt myself falling into their shared trance.

The room was no longer an abandoned broom closet but a cave on the side of a mountain. Winter winds howled outside. Frost cut through my skin and turned my blood to ice. Everything flickered as though through firelight.

The rug on the ground was the hide of a wooly beast. Bones and herbs simmered in a hollowed stone. Children dozed in warm piles like wildcats. Dogs that looked more like wolves slumbered, also in piles. Something like a large green-eyed cat stalked a tiny skittering shadow. Someone was chanting in a corner.

The dancing candleflames turned the posters from cheaply printed album covers to a series of paintings: genderless figures arranged geometrically, mammoths and giant elk, leaves and blossoms, spirals and comets and planets, and above all of them an infinite milky way of handprints upon pawprints upon hoofprints.

That night I dreamt for the first time in months. I was running with a herd of ibex toward the rosy glare of the setting sun, and when I reached the horizon, I was lifted on air currents up toward the point where the clouds met the darkening sky.

*     *     *
One of my former classmates grabbed my arm as I was about to walk onto the floor.

“I saw you following him, fatty.”

Pretty dumb he called me that, since just about everyone there carried extra weight.

“What’s he doing down there? It’s off limits.”

“Are you the supervisor already? We got hired at the same time,” I said, feigning confidence but feeling brittle.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“You mean like there’s always been? Or just, like, in terms of the order of shit here?”

“You think you’re better, too, huh? Well, he’s gonna learn a lesson.”

Later when he winched up a hog and split it open, I noticed the bucket over the drain and the guts slopping into it.

I knew where this was going. I’d seen the movie. Nothing turns out great when there’s a weird teenager and plenty of available blood.

I thought I should tell him. I tried to. But Jake didn’t really hear me anymore.

There was always something else he was listening to, some frequency past the ones most of us could access. Waves from deep underneath the ground where the tree roots mingled with mycorrhizal fungi and sent messages for the plants and the animals to consume.

I wanted to hear it, too. Maybe I didn’t try too hard to get his attention because there was a chance, however small, that if we all just let him be he would learn the secret of disappearance. Once he got there, maybe he’d have the mushrooms send me a message, too. Maybe I, too, could learn how to find my way down into that earthen dream.

*     *     *
It was little surprise late in the afternoon when I saw that same guy motion to a couple others and drag the bucket toward the other building. I followed them around the corner, but when they pried the steel door open and pushed the bucket into the darkness and started thunking it down the steps, I turned around and clocked out early.

I heard the supervisor got involved but only Jake got in trouble. He didn’t even try to defend himself, just stood there dripping blood and bile on the office carpet with his eyes bright white and his teeth chattering. Didn’t say anything except, when he was escorted out, asking where they’d taken his pig.

Of course the pig got killed. The pig always gets killed.

But it wasn’t in any spectacular way; she got pulled up onto the floor just as she was when she first showed up a month and a half prior.

Some eighteen-year-old kid put the scissor tongs on her head and induced electronarcosis, and once she was locked into her artificial slumber another kid cut into her and then she was gone.

They didn’t make Jake do it. That’s about as far as blessings go in Pigtown.

Last I heard he picked up a couple minimum wage shifts at a gas station the next town over, but only lasted a week.

I thought I would go hear his band sometime, but I kept finding the flyers a day or so after the shows had happened. It’s like the time was always out of joint.

The slaughterhouse kept running. New boys came in every summer. Everyone worked their way through the assembly line just by working. Everyone had kids so that one day they could replace them on the line.

The seasons shuffled through the same markers, from homecoming to Christmas to spring break to graduation.

Far underneath the ground, far deeper than most of us can hear, the bones of the animal dead rested alongside the bones of the human dead. Roots and fungus interlocked around them. Worms twisted wherever there was space, threading the still earth with movement. Even where it seemed the most silent, there were messages to be heard.