I grew up in Mesa, seventy miles from Happy Bellies, but some mornings I wake up feeling like I’m in a foreign country. Before coming here, I’d never seen a hawk talon a smaller bird from the air. I’d never seen a Saguaro bloom. I’d never seen a shrike impale a lizard on the spines of a barrel cactus. I grew up amongst palm trees and sprinklers. I grew up smashing scorpions with frying pans and shooing grackles from the hoods of cars in the parking lot at Circle K. The only times I ever went into the desert were in high school, when friends and I would drive into the Superstitions at sunset, fast on the winding back roads, windows down, jackrabbits fleeing from the high beams, or when, in summer, we’d float down the Salt River with tins of beer tied to our innertubes and we’d let our skin burn until it peeled.

I never meant to end up at Happy Bellies. A little over a year ago, I left my mother’s suburban home with my car packed full of everything I needed and nothing to make me remember what I was leaving behind. My belly was still soft with pregnancy, a hollowness, a room recently vacated. My plan had been to drive to White Sands. Hide in the dunes after the park closed, burrow like a sand snake, fall asleep pretending I was on the moon.

I had tried to be a mother, but I was a twenty-year-old college drop-out afraid of so many things. Afraid of the way her pupils shrunk into themselves when I took her outside. Afraid of the way my nipple disappeared into her mouth and how it hurt and how I was supposed to be okay with that. Afraid of blog posts with titles like ‘What a good latch feels like.’ Afraid of how her chin looked like mine and made me feel as if I’d had something stolen from me.

I couldn’t be a mother, but maybe I could be a snake in the sand.

My mother tried to stop me. She told me motherhood was supposed to be hard. She told me I was making a mistake and the only way to make amends for it was to grow up and do the responsible thing. I didn’t tell her I’d already contacted an adoption agency. I didn’t tell her it was already done.

I drove south with the windows down, like a teenager again. I saw signs for the Happy Bellies Open House painted on plywood boards. They were the sorts of signs I normally wouldn’t notice, signs that would blur as I drove past and blend into the desert. But now that I’d abandoned my old life, I felt I should accept every invitation, do what I normally wouldn’t, so I kept my eyes open and started paying attention to the new world I’d entered.

The sanctuary wasn’t what it is now — only twenty-five pigs, only two pens — but I loved it anyway. Loved that most of the people who worked there seemed to be seasonal volunteers who came and went, impermanent and unattached. I loved the pigs, with their ugly, rubbery snouts and the flaky skin that turned out to be harder, rougher, than I’d imagined.

A woman named Pam led my tour group. She was sunburnt and sinewy. Her hair was completely silver, cropped short under her Celtics cap. She touched each pig on top of its head and greeted it by name as we approached.

I wondered aloud where so many pigs could have come from.

“Some of them are handed over, no questions asked,” she told me, “by owners who flat-out quit. Some folks just decide they’ve had enough one day and give up caring, offload their burdens onto us.” I liked her voice. I liked her New England drawl and her unashamed anger. “But most of them,” she went on, “we rescue from abusive situations. Every month there are more pigs to save. Abused pigs making more abused pigs, on and on and on.”

After the tour came to an end, I approached Pam as the others dispersed to their cars. I told her I wanted to work at Happy Bellies. I said I’d work for free in exchange for a place to stay.

“What sorts of things are you good at?” she asked.

“I don’t sleep much,” I said. “I’ll work harder than anyone else.” That wasn’t an answer to her question. She shrugged, uninterested, started to turn aside. “Also,” I added, trying to hold her attention, wanting to convince her I was worthwhile, something I wasn’t even sure of myself, “I write things. I’m a sort of writer.” It was partially true. I’d been an English major at NAU before I got pregnant and dropped out.

“Maybe I have something for you,” Pam said.

She told me I could sleep on a cot in one of the offices if I could reliably put together the bi-weekly Happy Bellies newsletter. The newsletter went out to sponsors who liked to read stories, little anecdotes, about the pigs. I’d also have to write the occasional longer piece about what was happening at the sanctuary: new arrivals, repairs and renovations, things like that.

“Stories are good,” said Pam. “Stories are what keep the donations coming.”

I told her I could manage it.

“I’m shit at writing,” she confessed. “I keep getting calls about misplaced commas.”

Within two months I was also helping out in the pens and Pam had put me on payroll.

Within six months I’d saved up enough to buy a trailer and move out of the office.

Sometimes, now, I wake early in the morning and look out my trailer window and see the potbelly pigs playing in the last of the moonlight. The Saguaros’ shadows are long fingers reaching across their bristled backs. The pigs rear onto their hind legs and toss dried grass, confetti-like, into the air. After a year of working at the sanctuary, I can name every pig on sight, even from this distance, even in the darkness. There’s Othello and his sister Pickles. There’s Bigfoot, Esmerelda, Tiny Tim.

My trailer flanks the Active Seniors pen, though “active” is a relative term. People who sponsor the pigs like to bring toys in for their pigs to play with, and they’re disappointed when they find that the pigs prefer to wallow in the kiddie pool or snuffle around the prickly pears before finding a shady space to nap. Our sponsors are mostly wealthy and eager-to-help retirees who live in the Foothills, people who remind me uncomfortably of my mother. The toys they bring in are always toys made for dogs, colorful ropes looped through rubber balls and cute, chew-resistant bunnies with squeakers hidden in their soft chests.

At night, when the sponsors are gone, the toys fly. They get caught in the arms of the ocotillo. They arch over the fences into other pigs’ pens. Like a spell has been cast over the sanctuary, the pigs become spry and limber. I’ve never been a good sleeper. Sometimes I lie awake all night, forgetting what sleep even feels like. But when I see the pigs play, I think that maybe I’m sleepless for a reason. Maybe I was born to bear witness to this pig joy.

My mind drifts to Thomas. Thinking about him now, I notice things I didn’t when he was in front of me. I’ve always been this way. I notice more through memory than I do in the moment. I could live forever on a memory.

I focus hard on the memory of Thomas’s hand gripping mine. He must be older than me, but he seems younger. He seems like someone who’s never grieved.

I imagine kissing the corner of his drooping lips.

I imagine it as an experiment. I want to see what the fantasy of him can make me feel. I imagine him stepping toward me, closing the respectful space between us. He steps close enough that he has to tilt his chin down to see me. He doesn’t break eye contact. His body is stillness and control. I feel electricity in my spine.