I began wearing lipstick under my mask, like a pig does. No one knew my mouth was a party, and I guess that proves their point. I guess I have god’s problem. Having made them, now they are useless without me. Like the bobby pin I pull from my hair at the table with the classic country station in the mercantile of bad food halfway between home and three cities glommed together by a freeway cloverleaf. Onions spilt in its ditches. Under my mask, a feeling, a way of orienting toward the world without smiling, as is expected of my kind, whereas my kind, desiring a shovel, makes a shovel of its mouth. Something deeply hidden, like a T-bone around which I am marbled. I was there to take a virtual art tour, and right off the bat she showed us this one, not a special picture she said, just a reminder that pigs are both the most intelligent and the most slaughtered of the domestic animals. We should think about that, she said. And I was. It was around the 16th century that people started calling other people pigs, just as a regular old insult. By the early 1800s, it was more specifically a reference to a cop. In 1874, a slang dictionary published in London noted it was almost exclusively used by thieves to apply to a plain-clothes policeman, or a “nose.” Now, I do have a nose. When I read that people with sensitive constitutions love animals too much, did I feel offended? I did. I drop off this and I drop off that—sunflower starts and art books, I love you notes and postcards. The pigs follow at a casual distance; they’ve jimmied the lock; they’ve let themselves in.