You may have noticed all the straight boys in the office are trying to out-straight each other with tales of purposefully killing poor defenseless creatures like mice and pigeons.

Rich Smith won Charles Mudede's everlasting respect yesterday by crushing a mouse to death. If Mudede's glee was not palpable enough in the writing—"I will never forget the sound of all its bones breaking all at once"—it was really palpable in the office. Mudede beamed with pride all afternoon at his new murderer comrade. Mudede likes to suck dead animal's bones.

Then this morning, Brendan Kiley reminded us that back in 2006 he killed and ate a rabbit, a squirrel, and a slug. Mr. Kiley wrapped this memory in concern for the glue-trapped little bastard in our office yesterday afternoon, but don't fall for it. Remember Brendan's essay "The Urban Hunt"? It was full of sentences like: "I pass pigeons and squirrels, imagining what they look like beneath their skins..."

The way I wrap my head around all this is this: Mudede is a barbarian, Brendan is a gun-owner, and Rich is from the South. (Rich insists he's not from the South, he's from the Midwest. He's from Missouri... which is pretty close to the South! But he says that if you say that he's from the South you'd get "laughed out of Kansas City." For the record: I'm willing to be laughed out of Kansas City.)

I'm from California. San Jose until I was 7, Los Angeles until I was 18. Once in San Jose I was sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for my mom to come tuck me into bed and I saw an ant walking along a white surface, on top of a half-wall dividing the staircase from a walkway next to it. I was 6. Something about the ant gave me a creepy-crawly feeling like maybe after I was in bed it would follow me to bed and crawl around on top of me while I was sleeping. To my 6-year-old brain, this was unconscionable: An ant! On me! While I was sleeping!

And yet it was a cute little thing. A couple tiny segments, with legs. Little antennae. But god I didn't want it crawling all over me, what if it crawled into my nose? But it was harmless. But it was kind of gross too, I could just smush it really fast and then I wouldn't have to think about this anymore. I heard my mom walking up the stairs so I decided to smush it really fast but right as my little finger was coming down on it, the little thing, probably aware of my finger, or at least my finger's shadow, decided to change directions and my finger only ended up half-smushing it.

So now there was a half-smushed ant crawling around on the short dividing wall. All I wanted was to go five seconds back in time, to not have smushed it, to let the guy live. All the sadness and the struggle of being half-smushed was evident. What could I do to help this guy live? Oh, God, what could I do to help it live?

The happy front of an ant dragging around a smushed ass was the saddest thing I'd maybe ever seen, and the worst thing was I caused it, and by the time my mom was at the top of the stairs I was full-on sobbing. I pointed to the half-crushed creature and, crying inconsolably, tried to confess what I'd done, which was probably hard to understand through all the tears, and after confessing I tried to convince her to help me uncrush the part of the ant I'd crushed.

Very sweetly and gently my (awesome) mom explained to me there was no going back now. If there were any way to undo this, she would have undone it. She rescued dogs by the side of the road. She didn't crush spiders—she always put a glass around spiders, slid a piece of cardboard between the spider and the wall, and took them outside. She volunteered at the zoo (and got to hold a falcon on her hand in a show for kids). She did not have anything but compassion for creatures big and small. But she had a real sense of doom when it came to this ant.

She tried very patiently to explain to me that you could not uncrush part of an ant and that now the ant was in more agony than any ant deserves. Agony caused by me. Agony it was now up to me to undo. I remember her telling me I needed to crush the whole ant this time and I remember being unable to do it, both emotionally and visually. I couldn't see the ant anymore because the vision of it kept slipping and sliding around through all the tears. She was just as unable as I was to sit there watching it struggle, so she did it for me. She crushed the ant and brushed it away and took me to bed and undoubtedly sat there talking about life and death with me for an hour.

These days, if I see a spider in my apartment, I trap it in a glass and toss it out the window. I can't imagine it's all that healthy for a spider to be tossed out of a six-story window, but what do I know of spider life? There's a tree right outside the window. Maybe they land in the tree.