Tis the Season

I checked my e-mail before going to work and found one from a friend telling me that a young woman at her husband's work had been raped and murdered last night. Chased down by one of the client's at Peter's work and stabbed to death. All day, fleeting visions of a nameless and faceless woman lying in her blood, a shadow of a man making a trail of this blood back to his apartment there at the halfway house. I did not know her or him but it is enough to know the story and have the small connection of my friends in this terror's wake. Peter works with people even more violent than the man that did this and he is working there at this very moment. So the woman without a face lying in the snow becomes a man with Peter's face and eyes glazing over. Mary screaming in the background. Then the scene shifts entirely, Tom drives away to class and it is twisted metal and him trapped in a burning wreckage, face disfigured and empty. It is children unborn taken away from my care and help and spitted on some piece of the world's cruelty. And, of course, it is myself.

We are all afraid of death, and there is certain reason for it to my eyes. I have only seen death once: an eighty year old man, heart disease, had lived a long and relatively happy life...and it was still horrifying. It seemed wrong and unfair and it fed my nightmares for some months after that. There is nothing to be known about it except the mutilations given to us as evidence. It is the only evidence that is plain and the rest is left to philosophy and religion.