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from the house. The people are all dressed up like they just got back from church or something. I used to be a big TV watcher, and I’ve seen town hall meetings on television. Maybe that’s what it had been.
    But this is where the meeting ended. Facedown. Old men with white collars biting into their flabby old necks. Old ladies with hair nets and gloves. Parents and high schoolers and a few little kids. The bodies of mothers and fathers wrapped around their babies, but there aren’t any survivors. The suits and dresses are shot full of bloody holes. Most of the shoes are missing. There isn’t a way to know, but I guess they were good people who didn’t deserve what they got. I know I should cry or blow chunks or something, but I don’t. I know Mel would think I was a savage if she knew what was going on inside my head, but I’m so pissed off I can barely stand upright. I won’t lie. I want to blow away the people who did this. I want to blow them right out of the world.
    Mel froze up when she first saw the bodies, but she unfreezes and starts to run. I grab her and pull her behind a tree. It’s a big oak with a tire swing. Mel fights me, but I wrap her up and push her against the raspy old bark of the tree. For a second, I kind of like showing her how strong I am. Little brother isn’t so little anymore, is he? But now isn’t a good time to teach that lesson.
    Mel struggles and starts to compare me to all different kinds of vile shit. I shush her and then I try to listen. No running footsteps, no guns being made ready to fire, no commands to kill us. I don’t feel any eyes on us—not living ones, anyway. There’s nothing but the crackling of the house fire and the wind blowing through bare branches.
    I let Mel go, and she stays put. There’s some graffiti cut into the tree. Just beside our heads there’s a big carved heart with bare places above and below it, where the names were scraped away. A relationship gone bad. A symbol for our generation:
Nobody loves anyone
. But it makes me glad to see that the heart is still there, as if our fates are blank canvases and we’ll get another chance, and then we’ll be better and more interesting people because we lived through all of this shit.
    I look up. The tire swing’s rope has cut through to bare wood. I wonder if anyone’s ever been hanged from the old tree. I look for hanging bodies but the tree isn’t a part of this. I like it then, and I hope that someday it will carry more love graffiti on its old bark, and that kids will play on its swing on some sunny day in the future.
    Then a man comes out of the house. He’s on fire from top to bottom and he’s waving his arms. The fire makes it look like he’s shapeshifting. He flops down and rolls in the yard, but it doesn’t put the fire out. He says “help” and “please” and then “save me.” Dad rips a coat from the body of a fat man and throws it over the burning man and he gets the fire out, but the burned man is making a really weird sound, like he’s screaming but his vocal cords are cooked, and it freaks me right the fuck out. I don’t know if he’s good or bad, but I want the sound to stop. The guy is a melted pile of black slime but he scares the shit out of me. He whispers “please” but this time he also says “end it.”
    Dad doesn’t shoot him because we can’t afford to make any noise. Dad isn’t without mercy, though. He stands and butt strokes the man’s head until the quiet screaming stops. The thud of his AR-15 butt plate against a stranger’s skull. Dad’s face is all twisted, but he’s never been the kind of man who runs away from dirty work. The work that has to be done because it’s the only thing left to do. He picks up a little cotton sweater and wipes the blood from his rifle butt. The sweater is white with pink bunny buttons that stand out brighter than all the other colors in the world. He looks at me, and then he looks away. I turn my back and hope the wind