Businessmen mingled at this party. They mingled with artists who made them amazing sculptures of abstract animals and cute animals. The owner of the house loved the ironic taxidermy of roadkill. “If it’s roadkill, it’s pure. I just make them beautiful again.” The taxidermist was there.

I wondered if I ran over the taxidermist and preserved her in resin if she would feel beautiful. If she would feel pure. Exploded first into a jagged eruption and pulling apart of flesh and tissue and bone and sinew. Left with a hole where the chest had been. A face half sawed off. Or perhaps a broken back, still alive and gasping, but crushed to asphalt in the middle, hoping now for another car to finish the carnage.

But, to mingle. I must mingle. I must hover and flit and pirouette and make my excuses to the next conversation and engage in small talk.

“What about the weather?” But you could not talk about the weather on this Earth. The weather had turned bad. The weather was a traitor.

“What about sports?” But you could not talk about sports because the weather had “fucked up” the sports.

What could we talk about? I complimented the owners on their house. My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn’t yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and to drink from the pond. To gaze at my reflection and remember who I was, not what I had become.

“Did you find that here or did you have to go online?”

“That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.”

“Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

It was bracing to hear such honest talk, even if only in my head.

“And what do you do?” Directed at me.

The rasp: “I’m in private equality.”

“Equity?”

“Equality.”

“Wolves all in equity.”

“Some of them are foxes,” I said.

Then I revealed myself and my emissaries came smashing through the special nonreflective glass that had stopped birds from flying into it even as the owners’ vehicles and leaf blowers and pesticides had poisoned all the birds into extinction.

There is a question I should ask, but I feel you’ve forgotten the answer. I feel there’s no point in asking now.