The summer Annabelle got pregnant would instead be remembered as the summer of the First Annual Freedom Pig Festival. It was June, and after a long slog of winter rain, western Washington had given over early to endless blue skies frosted with long, unserious clouds, the heat of the sun cut by the wind sweeping waves into the surface of Puget Sound. Annabelle had been working in her mother’s bakery since she was fourteen, and her summers were filled with waiting. For credit card payments to go through. For her shift to end. For texts or Snaps or DMs. Summer was a shimmering mountain lake in which Annabelle floated, suspended in anticipation. That first warm week in June was the same one Annabelle graduated from high school, the piglet got out, and Annabelle’s parents kept the TV news on every evening, waiting to hear about the Dobbs case.

Annabelle was in a Starbucks bathroom in Everett when her mother texted, and she felt her first twinge of panic. Up until then, the whole thing had been methodical. She noticed her period was late. She drove thirty minutes south on I-5 to a Walgreens she felt certain no one from her small town would see her at. She took the tests to the nearest Starbucks where she bought a venti Pink Drink and sat at a table scrolling until she had to pee. Even when the first little plus appeared, she hadn’t felt any fear. With all the Covid tests she’d taken in the last couple years, she assumed it could be a false positive.

But then the second test was positive, too, and her mother texted, and for a minute Annabelle could feel her heartbeat in the back of her throat, the vibrations such that she thought she might throw up. She trashed the tests and her empty cup and opened the message from her mother as she left the bathroom.

Piglet got out, her mother had written. Dad is being dramatic. FYI

Stupid. Annabelle took a breath, feeling her heartbeat slow. Her mother was the smartest person Annabelle knew, but she wasn’t God. The baby was Annabelle’s secret, a ripple in the lake, not yet strong enough to push her to some shore. She opened her calendar app and counted back to her last period. Six weeks.

The piglet was one of a litter of seven belonging to Annabelle’s 4-H project. Her family lived in a swath of farm country nestled between the Sound and the Cascades, but they weren’t farmers. Her dad taught history at the local high school, and besides the bakery, her mother worked on the school board. Annabelle had raised the pig because Mac had wanted her to. So she could understand his life, and the life they might have together. They had graduated on Friday and that Monday he had reported to work at the pasture farm he would inherit when his dad retired.

She liked Mac. She liked his attention. He was big and played badly on the football team, and when they had sex, he put his hands on either side of her waist. With her eyes closed, it felt like he could wrap all the way around her. She felt vulnerable and small and had a dim notion that she was supposed to seek out this feeling, that this was good. Mac had sandy blond hair usually crammed under a Seahawks hat and a dappling of freckles Annabelle envied, golden counterpart to her under-sunned Pacific Northwest complexion. Mac didn’t care about college, and his fantasies of their future together never included Annabelle going, either. They would own the farm, and they would have boys, and, after she raised them, the boys would take over from their father what he had taken from his.

She knew Mac would be happy if she told him. She knew that this scared her, but she didn’t know if that made it bad.

That first 4-H piglet was cute. Annabelle liked raising it, or she liked watching Mac raise it. He did most of the work. Her family not owning a barn or pen or anything, he kept the piglet at his house. It had been his idea, anyway. That was the summer before senior year. She went over a couple times a week and watched as he changed out the mix of straw and wood shavings that the pigs slept in or refilled their feed and water if they got low. Mac had her walk the project pig around the pasture to build its muscle tone and taught her where to tap its neck to make it turn left or right, which she’d need to do at auction.

She named the pig Babybel, even though Mac told her not to name it. It’s not that she set out to defy him. She hadn’t even liked the pig in the beginning, its throaty, nasal snuffling, like it was clearing airways during a phlegmy cold. But eventually she started calling it Baby, the way she’d coo at a dog she didn’t know, and as the summer luxuriated in brilliant blue skies and Annabelle grew fonder of the pig, nicknames abounded, and Babybel stuck.

“Babybel because it’s yours?” Mac asked.

“Like the cheese,” Annabelle said, embarrassed because she hadn’t meant to name it after herself at all, but she kept the name all the way up to auction anyway. Annabelle studied how Babybel’s ears flip-flopped when she walked, how her curlicue tail trembled, the way she played like a dog, running to the entrance of the rain shelter when she heard people coming. Annabelle was aware of both her sentience and her helplessness. She could see the pig thinking.

“You wanted to see his life,” her mother said at the dinner table the night before the auction. “Well, this is it.”

“Sarah,” her dad said to her mother. Tim Harmon was nothing like Mac’s family, with disheveled brown hair atop a thin frame. There was no doubt that Annabelle got her softness from him. 

“I know that,” Annabelle said to her mother. “I’m just sad.”

When Babybel went up under her given name, Swine Project Number 11, her dad bid $600 they didn’t have to keep her alive. “What was I thinking?” Annabelle overheard him ask her mother as they fought that night. “I wanted Annabelle to be happy.”

After that, they kept Babybel at the house. Annabelle’s dad built her an enclosure of reinforced grid wire panels and set up a dinky, premade shed from Home Depot for shelter. They learned that pigs were notorious escape artists, something Mac wasn’t concerned about when Babybel was in his family’s electrified pasture. They didn’t even notice when Babybel got out, not until Mac called, letting Annabelle know that he’d found her wandering along his family’s fence and that he’d hold her until they had time to swing by.

That afternoon, Mac led Annabelle and her dad into the pasture to find Babybel standing silent and still while a boar thrashed behind her, his front legs balanced on her back while his swollen testes swung halfway down his legs behind him. Annabelle turned red and looked away. Mac laughed. “I guess she missed her boyfriend,” he said, then, noticing Annabelle and her dad’s shared mortification, assured them that Babybel was too fat to have been successfully inseminated. 

It was nothing to Mac. On one of the mornings that Annabelle had come over to watch him tend to Babybel, Mac had told her extensively about the process of pig breeding: how to detect heat from the red swelling of a sow’s vulva, how to apply pressure to its back to check readiness for breeding, how in penned environments the sow must be brought to the boar, and not vice versa, because the boars can find relocation distressing. Annabelle covered her ears and begged him to spare her the details, which only made Mac laugh. He wrapped his hands around her wrists and pried them away from her head, despite her resistance. He maneuvered her hands easily to the base of her back while he kissed her, still laughing at her discomfort. “It’s natural,” he said.

But Babybel got pregnant after all. Annabelle and her dad knew immediately that they were in over their heads. That was when her dad had the idea to have Babybel leave their lives the way she came in, up for auction with her piglets, raising money for the school rather than pocketing it as the farmer. The school had suffered for years from under-funding, and her dad was fed up after having been passed over again for new textbooks.

People seemed to like the idea when her dad first posted on Facebook, and it ballooned out from there over the short months of Babybel’s pregnancy, with planning and ideas taking over conversation in the town group. Her mother would sell baked goods and coffee. The pub would sell fries and beer. The school’s marching band would play. It was probably less about the pigs or the school as it was about having something to do, but no one told her dad that.

After leaving Starbucks, Annabelle locked herself in her room at home and took out her laptop. She had a mind like she was going to Google something, but she couldn’t think where to start and staring at the cursor made her palms sweat. She opened Facebook instead.

The first post in her feed was from her dad in the neighborhood group, announcing an AUCTION UPDATE about the missing piglet; he wanted people to know that there would only be six to bid on, rather than seven. Plus Babybel. Be aware that bids might run higher because of this, he had written. And please let me know if you have any information about our little fugitive before Saturday.

There were a few comments already under the update, people expressing their concerns about the piglet, their intention to go out looking. People Annabelle knew well: other teachers, her friends’ parents, the owner of the nice restaurant in town who bought cookies from Annabelle’s mother to make his own ice cream. Annabelle shut her laptop.

There had been a pregnant girl in school when Annabelle was a freshman. The girl was in an upper year and probably a carpooler from one of the small neighborhoods in the foothills. Annabelle remembered seeing her once, her stomach swelled under her gray t-shirt like a stone smoothed by the tides. She had blonde hair. She was pretty. Annabelle remembered her being pretty, like a ballerina in a children’s book, although she couldn’t conjure her face when she tried. She never learned her name.

Annabelle didn’t know if the girl graduated or left school, but she never saw her again, or at least never recognized her after she gave birth. For fear of staring, she’d never really seen her at all.

Annabelle knew she didn’t have to have the baby. Especially then, in the weeks after the Dobbs leak, when she couldn’t escape TikToks discussing What You Need to Know About The Supreme Court Right Now, America Hates Women and Here’s Why, and Abortion Resources You Need to Know About. Annabelle felt secure in the fury of these other women, though she felt unmoved to action and her parents only discussed the decision behind closed doors. Annabelle knew their county had barely gone blue in 2020, but felt, too, that such politics didn’t really impact her own life. When she closed the app, she didn’t hear about it.

What consumed Annabelle was that she could have the baby. She was eighteen. She’d finished school. College was a vague possibility, but not one she’d exactly planned for. Her parents felt she should go, but they couldn’t afford to send her if she was going to aimlessly take gen-eds until something stuck. Annabelle didn’t know what she wanted to study. She didn’t want to be a teacher or a business owner. She didn’t care for math or science. She had created an Instagram account for the bakery, and she liked working on it, but she didn’t know a single adult who thought of social media as anything other than a waste of time.

It had been her dad’s idea for her to take a marketing class at the community college to see if she liked it. Annabelle thought marketing meant suits and New York, red lipstick, people smarter than her. She didn’t see what it had to do with her little Instagram account at all, but the course was non-committal, a few hundred dollars which Annabelle and her parents would split, and if she didn’t like it, she didn’t have to go back. The current of the turquoise mountain lake drifting her body slightly towards one shore, then slightly back, water drifting through her limp fingers. Yielding to motion. She imagined the baby growing inside of her ounce by ounce until Annabelle sank in a line straight to the bottom, staring up at the vague, rippling world she had left behind, and when she gave birth, the baby would drown down there with her.

An older pig would have come home to where it knew it could be fed, but the piglet stayed missing through Tuesday and Wednesday. Julianne Simmons, the pharmacy owner, wrote in the group that she asked her husband to leave a bucket of grain feed out on their lawn to see if it would attract the piglet. Annabelle’s old English teacher, Mr. Hannigan, commented on her dad’s post asking if he could bring his dogs by to smell the pen. They were mutts, but Mr. Hannigan thought they might have some hound in them. Neighboring livestock farmers debated in a long, public thread about the efficacy of various styles of pig traps until the group’s moderator had to turn off comments because Herb Lepson told Paul McLeod that he should have gone bankrupt by now for all he knew about farming, and his wife was probably paying their bills on OnlyFans, and then Paul said at least his wife was pretty enough for OnlyFans, and Herb said your whore wife won’t love you anymore after I put a hole between your eyes.

On Thursday, Mac convinced Annabelle to come on a drive with him to try their luck on finding the piglet, truck loaded with pig treats and rope and a set of gardening gloves. By then, Annabelle had read that the baby was the size of a baked bean. She thought there was something inappropriate about the comparison, imagining the baby floating around her uterus in a sea of molasses and smoked paprika. A chickpea, at least. Something endearing.

She didn’t feel pregnant. She looked up photos of what the baby looked like and tried to muster some semblance of maternal feeling, but the renderings all looked like prehistoric worms, vestigial nubs where arms and legs would grow, primate tail still prominent. The size of a dime with a tiny, beating heart. She imagined waking up in the middle of the night to see it hovering there in her room, pink, spectral, and alien, floating towards where she lay frozen in anxiety, her heart pounding. Then the feeling would pass, and she would feel silly, rubbing the sweat off her palms.

She realized she could afford either the abortion or the marketing class. She still hadn’t told anyone.

Annabelle let Mac talk in the car. Up to now, his role in the family business had been mostly farm chores, doing whatever his dad told him to do on a given weekend: restocking feed and water, changing out hay, monitoring for disease, helping load animals to be sent for slaughter. The manual side of things. Now he would learn everything: bookkeeping and supply ordering, slaughter and distribution. They sold through partnerships with local grocery stores and restaurants, plus at a couple of farmers markets in Snohomish County.

“We should have a website,” he said. “And we should be selling down in Seattle. We need to get our name out there if we ever want to scale.”

Annabelle listened and stared out the windshield. She loved Washington, the backroads packed close on either side with evergreens, the occasional clear cut for pastoral swaths of bright green grass, and the long driveways leading to low ranch-style homes. Sometimes a road would cut just right through the trees, and she could see one of the mountains rising stoic and huge on the eastern horizon. It was still early summer and the biggest among them had thick white snowcaps, and if she didn’t know they were there, she could mistake the snowcaps for clouds, the mountains’ volcanic threat nothing but mist.

“I don’t think we’re going to find it,” Mac said, slowing the truck to a stop on the shoulder. He tapped his fingers a few times on the steering wheel. “Your dad is some farmer.”

“He was just trying to do something nice for me,” Annabelle said.

Mac sighed. “Look what happened, though. That piglet would’ve never been lost if you’d just sold Babybel.”

Annabelle looked over at him. She did feel that she loved him; he had a practical assuredness about the world, a confident farmer’s expertise unlike the other boys she knew from school. He grounded her. But it was that same practicality that gave him his callousness. She’d never been able to shake a twinge of alarm at the bottom of her stomach. His hand at her neck. How easily he overpowered her, the uncomfortable pleasure that he took in it.

“It’s probably scared out there,” Annabelle conceded. “It’s just a baby.”

Mac shrugged. “I don’t know about scared,” he said. “Piglets are tough. They’re born with their eyes open, ready to run.”

Without thinking, Annabelle said, “Did you know babies can’t see you when they’re born? The world is all blurry to them.”

“Yeah?”

Annabelle felt herself flush. “They taught us that in health class,” she said quickly. “You reminded me.”

Mac studied her for a moment, then put the truck in park. He leaned across the center console to kiss her, grabbing at her chest with one hand while pulling her closer to him with the other. Annabelle tried not to yelp at the sudden soreness. Of course. Another thing she’d learned in health class. 

“You okay?”

She nodded and kissed him back a little, but her mind was whirring. She imagined again what it would be like to marry him. Their own house that she would keep clean, buy flowers for, and bake cookies in: images conjured from romantic comedies or Pinterest or something. Nothing foul. No pig slaughter or kid vomit or fights. She felt safe in Mac’s certainty. His life was a neat line stretching out directly from his parents back to him, and if she only told him her secret, he would lift her off of her own path and onto his, and then she would know, too.

When Annabelle got her first boyfriend, a soccer player who had a pet lizard and shotgunned beers in the woods after games whether or not they won, her mother took her for a long drive. They went all the way down to Bellevue, to the mall, where they strolled from store to store, mostly window shopping. When they both got tired, they drove to Olive Garden, where Annabelle filled up on unlimited salad and breadsticks and a Diet Coke so she could take her chicken parmesan home as leftovers.

Midway through the meal, her mother set her fork down and asked Annabelle if she was being safe with her boyfriend.

Annabelle’s cheeks burned. She was fourteen then and hadn’t had sex yet, or even thought much about it, really not at all except that there was a rumor that Hannah Macklan had, and since then it felt like something had shifted among Annabelle and her friends; they were wearing tighter shirts and lip gloss and eye shimmer, participating in some ritual they didn’t yet understand but knew they were meant to emulate. Riverdale and the Jenner sisters and Brandy Melville clothes that unraveled in the wash. “Ew, Mom,” she said. “Gross.”

Her mother was not so easily cowed. “You know what I mean.”

In health class, Annabelle’s gym teacher had asked for a volunteer to put a condom on a banana and threatened to call on someone if no one volunteered. Annabelle couldn’t have imagined a fate more mortifying than being chosen to demonstrate. She and the soccer player had only kissed, and she had let him awkwardly squeeze her breasts, which didn’t give her much pleasure except for that she felt it was supposed to, and that the act itself was scandalous. In the end her teacher called on one of the boys, an examination which he passed, sending another ripple of rumor through the 9th grade.

“You know that having a baby is a huge responsibility,” her mother said, interrupting Annabelle’s train of thought.

“Jesus, Mom. Who said anything about a baby.”

“Well, if you’re not being safe—”

“I didn’t say that,” Annabelle said. “I’m not some kind of slut.”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say that,” she imitated, then took a sip of her water and softened. “I just mean it only takes one time,” and then she picked her fork back up and the conversation was over. Annabelle didn’t eat anything else. She brought her chicken parmesan to school the next day, where the soccer player ate it. They broke up over the holidays.

It had taken them six months, it turned out. Are you being safe? They weren’t. Mac was pulling out. It made Annabelle uneasy, but she could mostly forget about it while he was fucking her, his hands sliding up and down her back, pulling her into him. He was all over her, the feeling of him all-consuming until all of a sudden, the weight was gone and he pulled out, finishing onto her stomach. Afterwards she felt a little odd, like she’d blown out a candle on a cake and it had been taken away, not to be sliced but simply to be trashed.

She was pretty sure it’d happened on prom night, like they were the cautionary tale of an abstinence documentary. Mac had snuck a flask of Burnett’s into the banquet hall in Everett. When he pulled out his car keys at the end of the night, Annabelle had tried to wrestle them away from him, which he took not as concern but as desire, pulling her into the truck bed, where he was too drunk to pull out, finishing and then falling asleep on top of her. Afterwards, she thought she would suffocate, or overheat, or some horrible combination of the two, but the longer he laid there the more comfortable she felt, like the heft of a weighted blanket, flattening her into some hard, hammered, certain shape.

The week before Babybel had given birth, she had been restless, pacing the narrow length of her enclosure and pushing the hay into different piles. Annabelle could hear her huffing and snorting through her open window. Her teats had swelled to the size of grapefruits with elongated nipples, sagging almost to the dirt. Her vulva became red and inflamed and leaked clear fluid. Mac said this was all normal. He said to call him when Babybel finally laid down.

It was dark out when it happened. On the phone, Mac told her to grab all their spare towels. “And a heating pad, if you have one,” he said. “The piglets will need to be kept warm.”

Babybel’s enclosure didn’t have a light. They’d never needed one. Annabelle’s dad retrieved the emergency flashlight from the basement and set it down by the door, trained on Babybel like a spotlight. Annabelle and her dad stood a few feet off, looking at the pig. Annabelle thought Babybel would squeal and scream, but she lay quietly, staring straight at the wall. Annabelle pulled a treat from her pocket and knelt by Babybel’s face, but she just kept staring, uninterested. Annabelle left the treat in the hay and stood back by her dad.

“Well,” her dad said. “Isn’t this some mess we’ve gotten into.”

Annabelle laughed, and then they were both giggling, and looking at each other made them laugh harder, the sound loud in the tiny shed.

Her dad wiped at his eyes. “Your mom is right,” he said. Annabelle ducked her head. “This is what it’ll be like.”

They both looked at Babybel then. Annabelle heard Mac’s truck roll up into the driveway. She and her dad watched as a dribble of fluid left Babybel, and a patch of glossy pink skin appeared, wet like chicken breast from a package.

“Mac!” she yelled. “The first one is coming!”

They heard the door slam, and his footsteps running up. With his bare hands, Mac grabbed at the piglet, halfway out and still in its amniotic sac, and it slipped right into his hands, the sac sloughing off into the hay. He held a hand out to Annabelle and she understood, placing a towel into it. He rubbed the piglet in quick, rough strokes, warming it up. “There’s a girl,” he said softly, and it could have been to the piglet, or to Babybel, or even to Annabelle, watching in stunned silence. “No fuss.”

They didn’t find the piglet before the auction. The animal took on its own small-town mythos. Someone started a poll in the group on whether to name it Babe or Wilbur. In the bakery, Annabelle overheard someone ask if their friend thought the piglet might have just died, for which they were quickly admonished. It was Homeward Bound. It was A Dog’s Way Home. The pig was off on some grand adventure, breaking free of its destiny to be sold for slaughter, its own porcine American Dream.

We should call the auction the Freedom Pig Festival, one commenter had written, and it stuck. On Friday during art class, the third-graders made a banner to hang over the stage where Annabelle’s dad would call the auction. The pub printed out a new menu for their booth advertising Freedom Pig Fries. An enterprising teenager with a Cricut messaged Annabelle’s dad to ask if she could sell stickers of a drawing she’d done, which featured a galloping pig wearing a cape and goggles in the foreground while Mt. Rainer stood protective watch in its wake. It felt to Annabelle like the whole town was in on it, even though only two hundred people showed up.

At the fairground, Mac bought her fries and a strawberry lemonade and led her over to the seats that they had saved in the front. From his pockets, he pulled out two nips of Svedka. Annabelle went still. She tried to tell him she didn’t want it, but he just gave her a look like she didn’t seriously think she could survive the auction without it. Annabelle thought of the baby, their baby. She thought she remembered from health class that the first days of the pregnancy were the most critical time. Or was it weeks? She had already been drunk on prom night. Now she flushed with renewed panic, imagining her baby with an extra limb or something horrible and fatal: its heart grown on the outside of its body, such that it would die minutes after birth and Annabelle would have to hold it as it went cold in her arms, and then she would have to figure out again what she would do. Mac sloshed the vodka into her cup. Her throat felt itchy and hot, and she couldn’t drink the lemonade to soothe it.

Her dad came over to them before going on stage. He wore a button-down shirt and a cowboy hat, like he’d googled “auction caller” and bought a costume on Amazon.

“Mac,” he said.

Mac nodded. “Tim.”

“How you doing, kiddo?”

Annabelle found herself unable to look at her dad. She forced a smile and raised her lemonade at him, feeling his gaze.

“You still have a chance to say goodbye to Babybel,” her dad said.

He’d been saying it all week, but it made her too sad, thinking of stroking the pink skin between her ears and feeding her treats. Annabelle wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.

They raised almost five thousand dollars for the school. Babybel the matriarch went to the Stephens, whose daughter would be marrying Jack Deary in August, now that they had both earned their associate’s. Mac elbowed Annabelle lightly when they announced their plans to serve Babybel as their marital feast. “That would have been a good idea for us,” he said, trading her full lemonade cup for his empty one.

The first thing that they raised together, roasted on a spit and served with an apple in its mouth to celebrate their union. Life on the farm. She wondered if Mac would love a baby of theirs if it was a girl. She wondered if he would love their baby if it couldn’t labor. Her baby with translucent amphibian skin that revealed a webbing of blue veins beneath the surface. Her baby missing its ears, or its toes, a hole in its spine or its atria. How could something so complicated grow unconsciously inside of her? Cells replicating on an ancient recipe. Annabelle felt like the world was spinning on its axis, hurtling through space, and she was seaweed trying to give in to the motion, but it was all going too fast; why was it that everyone knew where they were running to, and Annabelle was only watching them go?

“I’m sorry,” Annabelle said, and then she vomited onto his shoes.

That night, Annabelle couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed on her phone, scrolling through TikToks until an ad popped up prompting her to take a break. She still didn’t feel tired, just embarrassed, so she closed the app and opened Instagram instead. It loaded to a photo Mac had posted of the two of them at graduation, his arm slung around her shoulders, pulling her into him while he kissed the side of her head. Next chapter with this one, he had written in the caption. She opened the comments, where a few friends had put hearts and fire emojis. Y’all make me believe in love, one had written. Annabelle scrolled back up to the photo, zooming in on Mac’s face, on hers. She had already been pregnant that day. She zoomed in on her belly like it could tell her something.

She closed the app. She was left to Facebook: her dad’s selfie with the bidding audience behind him, an ad for flouncy floral summer dresses, a friend’s mom posting about where her kid would be going to college. Then a post from the neighborhood group:

Does anyone else think something is fishy with this whole freedom pig festival? they had written. I never liked it when tim harmon kept that 4h pig. It’s against our values. Shouldn’t that auction money rightfully belong to us?

The post already had four comments, which Annabelle clicked to expand.

THANK YOU…I never liked him anyway

what do we even need new books for

That one had 10 likes, and people had started replying to it directly.

right like what’s wrong with the ones they have?

they want to tell our kids they’re bad people

Twelve likes. Annabelle could see the three animated dots which indicated that people were in the middle of drafting comments. She watched them roll in in real time, a pit forming in her stomach. Her dad was a socialist. His auction was taking away money from the real 4-H auction in the fall. He should be happy with the money the school got from the government; it was more than any of them got for their farms.

I bet there never was a freedom pig. He made it up for attention

I bet he killed it and hid the evidence

Tim? Please. The pig would have won

Six likes. Annabelle put her phone down. In the absence of its rectangle of white-blue light, her bedroom was perfectly dark, almost like she was nowhere at all. She tried to feel what was happening inside her, but she just felt hot. 

She stood to open the window. The night pressed into her bedroom, alive with sound. The leaves rustled in a rippling black mass, like a storm whipping across a lake. Bugs trilled from unseen crevices. She knew it was just the yard, yet she felt herself shiver, the unfamiliarity of it, awash in shadow. She stroked her stomach with her fingers. Could it be that the baby’s whole world looked like this? Big, dark shapes and noise. Squirming blind towards the familiar, like a long swim back to the shore.