One Bad Minute

Welcome to Anxious Carnivores, a miniseries about the changing culture around meat consumption. Despite growing pressures to quit meat, many Americans can’t quite do so—but they’re feeling weirder and weirder about how they eat it.

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of animal slaughter on a small farm.

The cows are named Baby and Snowday. Baby is a beautifully mottled brown and white, and Snowday is a solid, milk chocolate brown, her head topped with a tuft of funny cream-colored fur. They both have the most delicate eyelashes, bashful and lush. 

They are five years old, which is old for a cow in America; these are retired milk cows, once living on a family farm as part of Darigold, a farmers’ cooperative that works with small dairies across the Pacific Northwest. In their twilight years now, they’re at Vorfreude Dairy Beef, a farm off a long, loping little country road in the green foothills outside of Portland, Oregon. It’s owned by small-scale beef purveyor Rachel Hinnen, and today she is “harvesting” these animals—she is preparing them for slaughter. 

Hinnen is part of “the meat community,” as she calls it. While you can find people pursuing ethical meat production in many corners of the world, the practice has particularly gained traction in this slice of the American Pacific Northwest, where a “conscious carnivorism” movement, which advocates buying hyper-local meat or practicing butchery, has been growing for at least a decade. You might be familiar with Colin the Chicken of Portlandia fame, a skit in which a restaurant server describes to diners the name and life of the chicken on their plate. Or, more recently, a viral Tweet of the fake Uber Eats feature “Meet Your Meat,” in which you can learn that your rib eye was named Janice and enjoyed alfalfa.  But the real-life meat community is serious—a more earnest group of true believers you will not find anywhere, with a conviction that borders on semireligious. You should meet your meat, they believe. In fact, to truly eat meat ethically, this means observing every step of the process: birth, life, and death, from the pastures to the butcher shop.

“I’m really glad you’re here for this,” Hinnen tells me as we stand together in the February mist. She wears a no-nonsense work hoodie, slate tights, and muck boots, her long blonde hair tucked beneath a knit beanie. “I think it’s really important to experience this part.” 

The sky is warship gray. Rain falls like television static. The mobile slaughter truck is due in one hour, and the field is redolent with the smell of cow shit. Baby and Snowday—named by the family dairy where they previously resided—are not the only bovines on the property. In the pen behind us stand a group of retired Jersey dairy cows, squat and fat and rust-colored, who are marked for slaughter in the coming weeks. In the next pen over three more cows—“my pets,” she says—who go by the names Domino, Lucy, and Oreo. 

“I can’t kill the OGs,” she laughs. Domino and Oreo (two classic black-and-whites) have developed the rapscallion habit of hopping fences, which one might think would mark them for the slaughter truck but has instead endeared them to Hinnen, the way a problem child is often a mother’s secret favorite. Lucy (latte brown and cream) is another story entirely. “She accidentally wound up pregnant,” Hinnen tells me, “and I spent three weeks saving her life every day from a series of complications. By the end, I felt like, you know—‘I nearly killed myself trying to save you, so how can I kill you now?’”

Much of the beef we consume in America comes from younger cows, aged between 18 and 24 months old. Most are raised specifically for beef production, the product of generations of selective genetic breeding to increase yield size and fattening speed, aided by a modern cocktail of hormones and antibiotics. Beef from older cows—including dairy cows—has long been commonplace and revered in Europe, particularly in Spain, Austria, and the United Kingdom. But in the United States, dairy cows past their prime are typically blended alongside thousands of other animals a day as part of a general ground meat supply. 

Retired dairy beef is highly prized by a small but enthusiastic number of American beef connoisseurs, showing up at specialist butcher shops and on farm-to-table restaurant menus. Some small butchers separately slaughter certain cows like Snowday and Baby so that their meat can be sold and consumed individually, their unique flavors more present like those of a single-origin specialty coffee microlot or a walled clos of hallowed Champagne grapes.

I’m given a bit of busy work feeding Hinnen’s pet cows—a.k.a. the permanent collection—from a plastic pail of compressed hay treats. They lap it up from my hands with their massive prehensile tongues, agile as monkey tails, frothing with saliva and anticipation. (The word vorfreude in German means “joy in anticipation.”)  

“A cow never had a better life,” Hinnen tells me, preparing a bundle of sage as a sort of preharvest ritual she conducts on mornings like this one, balancing the herbs carefully atop a fence post. I hand her my lighter—hers is in the truck—and her words grow uneasy. “I hate these days,” she says. “I don’t sleep well. I cry over every single one of these cows, and I fall in love with every single one.” 

I ask about the inherent contradiction of this, you know—loving an animal so much throughout its life and then overseeing that being’s death. “I get what you’re saying,” she says—she’s heard this question before—“but truth is, it would be a problem if I didn’t feel that way. It would mean I didn’t care, you know? And the point of all this. The point is to care.” 

Smoke billows from the sage, and the smell immediately alters the cows’ demeanor; they become noticeably mellower, even contemplative. Or is that just my projection? My own anxieties?

“Let me send you back over to the Jerseys for a minute,” she tells me. “I want to make a video and I get self-conscious.” Hinnen climbs into the pen, crouches down in the shit and muck, and talks quietly into her phone as the rain falls, the sage scenting the air, the cows posing just beyond her shoulders, framed artfully in the shot. Later, the video appears in Hinnen’s Instagram Stories, an instantaneous update for those who cannot be here to witness their steak being killed.��

The origin story of the meat that Americans consume is fundamentally uncomfortable, like that of our clothing or rechargeable batteries. Meat consumption as a narrative is fundamentally informed by death; it’s always there, lurking, like the omnipresent specter in Hitchcock or Shakespeare. The wider conversation about the ethics of consuming meat dates back to Plato, Pythagoras and Epicurus, as well as the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, and the concepts of halal and haram in Islam, which, among other rules, consider how an animal is slaughtered before it is eaten. Across cultures and centuries, meat consumption—both our love of it and the questions it raises—is woven into the fabric of who we are, fundamental to a broad panoply of faiths. From the oldest cave paintings of water buffalo hunts to widely varying modern screeds (“Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat” versus “Moral Veganism”), seemingly everyone—and everyone’s ancestors—has a take.  

The current ethical meat movement isn’t new either, with organizations like the Ethical Omnivore Movement drawing a sharp line between the consumption of factory-farmed meat and dairy and other, smaller means of arriving by these products. (“There should be no shame in the use of animal-based products—just in the cruel, wasteful, careless, irreverent methods of production,” its website reads.) Guides to ethically eating meat abound, even as we wrestle with the so-called meat paradox, in which animal lovers are still able to enjoy that delicious cut of steak. 

What’s novel today is the extremely online-ness of it all. Social media has intertwined with the age-old practice of raising animals for meat in a distinctly modern way; everyone and their mother is quite literally on social today, and America’s family farms, butcher shops, and heirloom meat geeks are no exception.

I found out about Vorfreude Dairy Beef via this great discovery engine of our time. That said, Hinnen’s Instagram account, @vorfreudedairybeef_, is tiny with barely 500 followers. Her business involves direct sales of beef “shares”—typically a quarter of the whole slaughtered cow, sold at $6.85 per pound on the hanging weight—to home chefs, friends, and assorted beef enthusiasts. She also makes candles, soaps, and body butter from beef tallow processed in her own home kitchen and sold at local farmers markets and retail pop-ups, and she’s working on a line of tanned leather wallets, earrings, and belts. Plus, “cow yoga retreats” and “photo sessions.”   

Some little kids might circle toy ads in the Sunday paper; Hinnen, age 10 in suburban Oregon, would scout the classifieds section for old cattle ranches, begging her baffled parents for cattle and land. After high school, she deferred college to work on a vast cattle station in rural Australia, and now, at 33, she’s built a small, intimately personal business around raising cows, loving cows, and yes, slaughtering them to produce high-quality grass-fed beef. “Since I was old enough to have dreams,” she says, “I have dreamed about this.”   

Others also have. Larger accounts like Big Sky Caroline, Five Marys Farms, and Ballerina Farm have built #ranchlife followings in the thousands, to say nothing of Star Yak Ranch, the yak meat and jerky concern of social media provocateur Jeffree Star. From farmers like Caroline Nelson of Big Sky Caroline entering her “sheep doula era” (assisting in the birth process of a lamb) to a retired Holstein cow “living her best life” (receiving a loving brush down from Hinnen) at Vorfreude, some of this content reflects an aspirational lifestyle, although that is quickly offset with #farmlife realities: long days, early mornings, missed family events, and financial struggles.  

The meat community functions around a fundamental moment of tension, in which the animal—named, loved, filmed, the source of countless joys and heartaches and sleepless nights (not to mention shares and likes)—moves along to the Great Ranch in the Sky. In this way it is meaningfully distinct from pet influencers and the myriad animal-obsessed tribute accounts (my favorites are @itsdougthepug and @ekekekkekkek, respectively), but I do think it still relates to the grand infinitesimal why behind how our brains respond to cute animals. Your favorite rancher is now on your social media feed, goofing off with an adorable 1,000-pound cow. 

Hinnen estimates around half of her business comes from social media, and she considers it a tool for both sales and culture, a way to sell the bigger picture experience of her product to curious followers who may one day become future customers. “Social media also offers us an opportunity to educate,” says Sean So, the cofounder of Preservation Meat Collective, a company that links tiny ranches and heritage-breed animal farmers across the Pacific Northwest with butcher shops, restaurants, and direct-to-consumer connoisseurs of small-production beef, lamb, fowl, and game. He tells me a rib eye is just two percent of the meat on a cow, a wasteful amount. “The way meat is bought and sold in America is so incredibly broken, and we’re trying to teach people that every day online.” Some days, that’s advocating for unsung cuts, like ranch steak (also known as “arm steak”), and other days it’s educating on the age and life cycle of the animals we consume. 

So was born in Cambodia and moved to Bellingham, Washington, as a child. “I’ve been harvesting animals my whole life,” he tells me. His father would buy whole animals from farmers and split them between multiple families. Today So and Preservation cofounder Travis Stanley-Jones work with a network of more than 35 individual farmers, connecting, say, Wagyu beef cattle from Enumclaw, Washington, with restaurants in Seattle, or fresh squab from Benton City, Washington, with a butcher shop in Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle. The company works with a who’s who of restaurants across Washington State, including more than a dozen places such as Off Alley, Restaurant Homer, Hanoon, and many more. “Our goal is the opposite of greenwashing or hiding behind the gray areas of meat production,” So says. “We’re trying to build a new kind of commodity system that is not commoditized.” 

On Instagram, the effect is the opposite of nameless, faceless factory farming. Preservation’s account opens a portal into the world of small-production meat—one day it’ll post about signing a new lamb purveyor that happens to be a fifth-generation family farm, the next day a video of So proudly discussing the 14-hour harvest process for fresh squab. This work follows people raising protein outside of traditional systems and animals apparently living very different lives—longer, with fresh air and clean grass—than the millions of cows, pigs, and sheep slaughtered each day in factory farms. Followers see the whole cycle, from photos of cows in the pasture to the slaughterhouse to dining rooms. 

Give modern humans all the knowledge of the universe in the palm of their hands and they’ll use it to talk about shepherds and sheep, ranchers and beef, and how to butcher and cook the finished product. We’ve social networked ourselves back to the very origins of collective agricultural living, using the unthinkable vastness of God in our pockets to become more like our ancient selves. There’s something adorable about that—comforting, even—and something brutal too. 

“At the end of the day, the animals need to die,” So tells me. “They need to go to harvest.” 

“The waiting is the hardest part,” Hinnen says, joining me by the Jerseys. 

“So when it happens,” I ask, making nervous small talk in the rain, “how do they, like…how do they do it?” 

“They’ll use their .22s,” she tells me matter-of-factly. A rifle, she explains, to shoot from a distance of 10 yards or so, giving the animal ample space for what comes next. “These guys are pros, and so most of the time it only takes one shot. The most dangerous part is what happens after—the most hurt you’ll get doing this by a dead cow. They’ll kick for 10 minutes sometimes, after they’re done.” 

We sit with this information together. 

“Once they go down, the whole thing shifts,” she says. “Most people never think a moment in their life about productive death. Death is either a disaster or a murder, but never something deliberate. Intentional death, meaningful death, we almost can’t fathom it, even though we consume it every day. “

Snowday and Baby are watching us now. The “gold standard” is to withhold food from a cow for at least four hours before slaughter, Hinnen tells me, “but I have to give them a last meal. I can’t help it.” Even still, Snowday and Baby are hungry—cows are always hungry—and they’re busily snuffling together along the boundaries of their pen, nosing out every strand of grass just beyond the fence, using their massive tongues and jaws and lips to pluck cud from mud. 

“People sometimes talk about the theory of ‘one bad day,’” Hinnen continues. “The idea that by treating animals well before we kill them, as opposed to keeping them in factory farms, they’re only really experiencing one day of discomfort. We go even further. We butcher them right here, at their home pens, and so they never even feel fear or pain at all. It’s really more like ‘one bad minute’—they have no clue what’s coming. And then it’ll be over. You’ll see.”

We stand watching the cows together for a while. There are more chores to do, but it’s hard to get anything done at this point. The tension builds. The mobile butcher guys text Hinnen and tell her they’re running a little bit behind. “They got stuck doing a couple extra cows at another job,” she says, “but they’ll be here any minute.” 

Time passes at a crawl. The cows forage. The rain falls. Every few moments we hear, then see, a new truck passing along the country road, but it is not the truck.

A big van goes past—like what we’re looking for, I figure—but it’s for someone else’s project, someone else’s rural tableau. My heart is roaring in my chest now, adrenaline pumping.

At last, a drab gray box truck pulls off the road, and Hinnen runs to the gate to let it in. The truck is manned by two fellas, Cole Stovall, 20, and Connor Barnes, 27, both tall and lean in matching ash-green Helly Hanson rain gear and knee-high Welly work boots, sipping Red Bulls and leaning out the windows. Barnes is wearing an American flag hat. They do this work all day long, traveling farm to farm across rural Oregon, operating a full-service mobile slaughter unit for independent farms and ranches. It’s just a job, like any other—and that means they’re on social media, too, part of the chain of content in the wider meat community. (Stovall’s bio on Instagram reads, simply, “Slaughterman 🔪🔪” )

Stovall and Barnes nod my way and make a little small talk with Hinnen, but these guys get paid by the hour, and we are on a schedule. Things move quickly now. Hinnen changes into a pair of pink bibs; Stovall and Barnes unlatch the back and side doors of the mobile rig, which is already half full of hanging quarters from a busy morning. Stovall pulls a large rifle from the back of the truck—the aforementioned .22, tourmaline-black—and secures a pair of ear guards. I instinctively step back five paces, then 10. 

Snowday and Baby stand there, blinking and clueless. The chubby Jerseys are watching intently, and so is Oreo, the fence jumper, who has come over to follow the action from the post of her pen. Do they know what’s coming? Can they sense our anxiety? Or is this, too, an evolutionary trick to make us care more?

Stovall loads the rifle. The men enter the pen. Everything is quiet.  

“I hate this part,” Hinnen says. She covers her ears. I follow her lead.  

CRACK! 

Instantly I smell the gunfire, acrid and clinging to the nose, suspended in the drizzle. One shot, one kill. Snowday drops in a heap, the lovely brown of her hide sinking into the mud. 

CRACK! 

Baby falls next to Snowday. Smoke hangs in the air. The valley is a whisper.

I spent a year eating vegan in 2019 and wrote about the experience extensively. I committed myself to it because I wanted the perspective, I was curious about the purported health benefits, and I found the food culture around veganism thriving more and more, from the Pacific Northwest, where I live, to Amsterdam, home to one of the greatest vegan lunch spots, Mr. Blou I Love You. This experience fundamentally changed how I thought about meat and animals, almost like a system reset. It forced me to reconsider meat consumption in all its facets, the good and bad. In the end, I went back to eating meat for equally multifaceted reasons: Veganism alone didn’t meet my health needs, and the highly processed nature of many of the vegan products I found myself consuming seemed like a contradiction of goals. I also, frankly, really missed eating meat and wondered if there might be a kind of third way forward.

I think it’s fair for an observer to feel skeptical about ethical meat consumption, to wonder if the “ethical” part might not be much more than a kind of self-referential hokum, the sort of thing we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. This is certainly the objection of much of the modern animal rights movement, which fundamentally stands opposed to animal slaughter in all forms, be it factory farms or intimate operations like those of Vorfreude Dairy Beef or Preservation Meat Collective. The point made here is compelling: If we’re endeared to animals, and care for them and identify with them and even love them, then it must be some form of sin to reject those feelings of love and engage in their slaughter, or consume the products derived from it. What someone like Rachel Hinnen calls “productive death,” groups like PETA term “genocide.” 

Both groups—the vegans and the meat community—arrive at the same conclusion, which is the earnestly held conviction that theirs is the true form of consumption with ethics. Both might be true and also neither. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the horrors of meat production as depicted in prevailing vegan propaganda are almost always tethered to the experience of factory farms, images of which look baldly, undeniably, like scenes of atrocity. 

Small-production meat arguably offers an alternative way; it’s not abstention, nor is it gross excess, but rather a more nebulous and complicated thing—one often financially inaccessible to many. It’s easy to claim small-farm production as the more ethical choice, but that neatly ignores the real financial costs involved in sourcing beef this way, not to mention the environmental impact. Factory farming allows prices to stay low while producing as much meat as humanly possible, the very same cruel logic that leads to sweatshops and cobalt mines. The national average retail ground beef price is $4.81 a pound; you can expect to pay twice that at a high-end, small-farm-focused butcher shop in the Pacific Northwest. Small-scale farming is also difficult and expensive, as well as emotionally and professionally draining, a series of long hours and sleepless nights and tests on mental health that farmers make (of course) endless memes about. “These heifers are robbing me blind,” one rancher captions a post about the cost of cattle.

“Nobody does this to become a millionaire,” says Hinnen. “The up-front costs are huge, and the financial landscape changes so fast, from frost to vet bills.” Factors like alfalfa cost indexes and variable fencing supplies complicate cost-per-cow calculations. As a beef producer with fewer than 20 heads of cattle at a time, though, Hinnen is in the bottom 12% of cow herds nationwide. Her business is tiny and not yet profitable. Even then, finances are partly why Hinnen focuses on her style of small-scale beef production as opposed to dairy. “Beef is nuts, dairy is worse,” she tells me. “The price of feed is quickly outrunning the price of milk, and dairy farms are going bankrupt left and right.”

There are no easy answers. It is an itchy, uncomfortable set of realities, one that can drive you mad if you let it, creeping up again and again with the ding of every dinner bell. We say ethical consumption is a fallacy, but we are drawn to attempt it, over and over. Such efforts may just require embracing discomfort from time to time in our too-short lives. We may not have a choice when we inevitably come across it on our social media feeds. It means we don’t get to look away.  

Stovall and Barnes move with balletic efficiency, first with guns, then with blades. A few moments after firing the two fateful shots, they advance on Baby and Snowday with plastic-sheathed knives glinting under the weak sun. They man up to each cow, cleanly slitting their throats in single rips. The cows flail wildly in the mud as the electro-pulse-charge neuronic pathways in their bovine brains slowly fire out, very much dead but not yet at rest. The bodies kick and piss and gasp. There is so, so much blood, rushing like a busted fire hydrant from their steaming throats, draining into the muddy ground, forming iron-red rivulets of heavy gloss, fusing with the rain puddles. 

The Jerseys are gathered together at the fence behind us, watching intently across the 10 long minutes. “You guys are next!” Hinnen says, joking. A little gallows humor.

At last, the cows finish flopping and rutting, and the slaughtermen get to work. No movement is wasted. First, they attach large chains to the hind legs of the cows, which are hooked to a large industrial winch that allows them to be pulled efficiently through the mud and up to the back of the box truck. Once there, Stovall and Barnes set up two huge plastic barrels and sharpen their knives. They wash the mud and blood off Baby and Snowday using a hydraulic pump water system mounted to the back of the truck and then skin them in clean, easy slices, like pulling up carpet from a remodeled den. They sharpen the knives constantly. They chop off the fore and aft limbs, cracking the legs (first at the coffin joint, or the hemline of the hoof, then at the stifle, roughly equivalent to the human knee) and tossing the discarded hooves and bones into the gore buckets. Handsaws and bonesaws come out next, and it’s all surreal to watch, numb and horrific and dreamlike.

Snowday’s corpse begets considerable inquiry; she’d concealed a large abscess beneath her breast, and Hinnen fixates on it. She has become analytical and focused now, setting aside the emotional thoughtfulness of a few moments ago for something more like evaluation (the bundle of sage long ago extinguished in the rain), assessing the cow for its health, cutting open the offending abscess, allowing a mixture of puss and blood to flow onto the grass like liquid nacho cheese. Meanwhile, Barnes pulls Baby’s heart from the chest cavity—a normal part of the slaughter process in which an animal is dismantled—and washes it with the hydraulic pump, sending first a spurt of blood and then a rush of water cascading out of the left ventricle. 

“I guess she was a lover,” he says, chuckling. “She’s got a big heart.”

An enormous sack of organs is removed next, including the cow’s stomach, which Barnes and Stovall slice open to remove the contents, revealing a pungent aroma of partially digested grass. Hinnen crouches over it to evaluate as the slaughtermen begin breaking down Snowday and Baby into quarters, firing up an electric saw to carve through bone and sinew. As they strip the cows down, they start to look like steak—I notice a hint of marbling, of raw exposed flesh like what I might see at a butcher’s counter. 

I’m standing there, thumbing notes into my damp phone, the text jumping all over on me, trying to keep my shit together as Hinnen starts hauling Baby’s skin over to the back of her pickup truck. It’s a heavy job and something in me is compelled to help. I bend over and assist her in dragging the hide. There’s blood on my hands, city parka, and shoes as we carry Snowday’s beautiful brown-and-cream skin.

“I’ll use all of this,” Hinnen says, lifting with her knees, pink bibs and beanie and long blonde hair wet with rain. “Some for leather, some for pillows. We’ll even make candles out of the fat. Everything from today, it’s all going somewhere. It all means something.” 

Weeks later I text her to ask about producing products from the cows I watched at the harvest. “My goal is to bring more value to these hard-working dairy girls and show the world that they’re more than just ground beef,” she says. “Even the skulls are saved and cleaned as well. I currently have Baby and Snowday’s pretty skulls decorating my living room.” 

I’m punch-drunk from the sight of it all as I drive the long way back to Portland, down the lonely highway and through the little town of Molalla, passing family farms and solar harvest fields, alien crops tilting toward the hidden sun. In that moment, part of me never wants to eat meat again, and part of me wants to eat a steak, and I feel like neither version makes sense.

The thing is, this kind of meat is delicious. If, at the end of the day, what you really care about is taste, retired dairy beef from a happy cow with a happy life is one of the most remarkable things you can eat. My first time eating retired dairy cow, back in 2020, was nothing short of revelatory: The flavor was deep, the chew umami-rich and savory. The fat had something herbaceous in it, like clover and green grass, and the meat had just the most evocative nutty-beefy-bloody taste. You barely even have to cook this kind of beef, and all the rest of my favorite things to enjoy with it—a spike of fresh horseradish, a buttery fork of sautéed mushrooms, a funky pop of Stilton blue cheese, and, most especially, the crisp, clean cut of good red wine—compose themselves in a polyphony of flavors and textures. 

“The meat on older animals is the most incredibly dark shade of red and will be capped with yellow fat full of carotene from a life spent grazing fresh grass,” Kevin Smith says. He’s a James Beard Award–nominated chef and butcher who operates Beast & Cleaver, a butcher shop in Seattle that sells exclusively small-production meat from local family farms, often with a focus on retired dairy cows. 

“The beef flavor of these cuts is just massively amplified,” he continues. “Cooked properly and sliced against the grain, the flavor is unparalleled. It’s one of the most marvelous things you can eat in your life.”

Whatever it is you think about this world—the meat community, small-production beef—I can tell you that the resulting products are not just delicious, but delicious in a way that is moving, emotional, even profound. That might sound woo-woo to some. But when you understand how the food on your plate has died, I think you simply taste it more deeply.

I somehow pilot the car back across the highway, but I can’t go home yet. I need to talk with someone, to process the experience, and so I drive, quite without realizing it, despite how obvious the choice may seem, in the direction of my favorite city butcher shop. It’s exactly the sort of joint that focuses on small-production animal farms, a place called Revel Meat Co.  

A butcher named Vicary Biggs is working the counter—he’s the guy I buy meat from most weekends—and I just start unloading on him, telling him all about what I’ve just witnessed, the gun and the knives and the gore and the mud and the rain. “That’s so cool,” he says empathetically. (I am visibly rattled.) “Most people never see that part of the process. More people should.”  

Rachel Hinnen wasn’t kidding when she said everything from today would be used in some way or another. On Instagram, she posts the video from earlier in the day, crouching in the mud, the rain falling around her tear-reddened face. “I’m hanging out here with Baby and Snowday,” she says, “and today is their day to go.” The story is saved under an Instagram highlight titled, simply, “Slaughter Days.” The slaughter itself isn’t shown.

When I finally arrive back home, my shoes are splattered in dirt and mud and shit and blood, but I can’t seem to bring myself to clean them. They sit for a day like that, two days, and I know I really should take care of it, but I keep avoiding the moment. It’s been weeks now, everything caked into the soles, dried and unyielding. Something about it feels both wrong and right.