Our town experienced the mildest summer in decades: wind struck buildings and damaged the windows of my kindergarten. I was five. I had just decided to become a vegetarian. My dog ate a hamburger out of my palm. He was a puppy then, a yellow lab. Cows meant something to me. How could I eat something larger than me? I thought the worst thing a person could be was selfish. That week had been special. Our class had spent months growing caterpillars into monarch butterflies, and on my birthday, we released them into the air. We understood they were going to try to migrate down south. Before they took that trip, one landed right on my nose. I saw its wings pulsating, covering the span of both my eyes. The orange in the sunlight became transparent. The black could have swallowed me whole. The wings closed and I thought she was gone. The wings opened and my smile delighted. She flew away and I felt like I had been chosen for something, a premonition that I might have a bountiful year. I had twelve new months to not be selfish at all. I would eat nothing that had lived and breathed. I would eat nothing if it was made to depart from its bones. My father took me to the playground a few days later. There was nobody else there. I wished there was. I got up on the balance beam: a metal, twisting snake of a structure. He caught me by the arm as I slipped, tugging me just so that my arm came right out of its place. I hung there dangling, in some sort of limbo between a face full of mulch and a sling for weeks. I hung there dangling, like a body not meaning to deviate from the pride of its soul.