Busloads to the border.

Tonight I listened to this recording of children crying helplessly for their parents at a detention center on the southern border of the United States and remembered the feeling in my gut the very first time I heard the sound of an animal being slaughtered. I was nine or ten and sitting in my mom’s minivan as we rolled slowly over the speed bumps on our way into the mall parking lot. A crowd of anti-fur activists was blocking the entrance to the department store — Bullock’s, maybe — playing a tape on loop of a living animal being destroyed.

Involuntarily, my eyes salted with hot tears, which I attempted to wipe away with the backs of my hands so my mom wouldn’t notice I was crying. My face was hot and red, and a crank deep in my belly was prying open a fissure I’d never felt before: a nausea like a gush of lava was rising up in me as my eyes continued to fill mutinously with tears. The shame of being human. The horror of what we do.

I wanted no part of it.