I decided I loved her because the first time we fucked I was flung suddenly and viscerally into a childhood memory of the county fair pig races. It’s clearer now that we both loved drinking, and only when we squinted, could we love each other too. We were brought together by that unnamed phenomenon which binds two people for a time, to cohabit and sign contracts and shatter plates and puncture drywall and most importantly to reproduce, so as to keep the whole diseased machine moving. That was out of the question in our case because she started the pill shortly after our courtship began. It made her fat and she hated herself though she had never been more beautiful, but instead of telling her at the end of a long night I would utter the one thing I knew would pierce her center and make her small and I shrunk her down like that until she was gone. I did think of repeating her sometimes. A small part of me believed we could resolve all of this by having a little girl and naming her something old-timey like Edie. We’d feed her juice boxes and take her to go see the pigs. I could see her curly head bobbing in the backseat. Each piglet gets a ribbon and a celebrity pun-name. Sometimes they dole out little plastic snouts that you can strap around your head. Our family would sit on those dirty bleachers and wait for the old man to yell. She and I lived next to a sugar factory. So close in fact that when we opened up the windows the whole house breathed in that chemical-sweet air. But it’s rare I think of the house or any of the damage we did to one another in it. Only the first night. We were at a dive where my friend from Nashville was playing a song that was once a story that someone told on a mountain before our grandparent’s grandparents were ever born. We drank bourbon sweet tea. She followed me back to my apartment. Dolly Porkton and Patsy Swine ran wildly.