I. THE SHATTERING

The moments of susto. The shocks that send the soul flying.

1. The Man at the Television

The man sits in the blue light of the television. Outside the windows the last of the day drains from the sky and he does not move to turn on a lamp. The faces on the screen speak of things far away and close at hand and he cannot tell anymore which is which.

His wife is in the kitchen. He can hear the small sounds of her moving. The clink of a glass. Water running. She does not come to sit beside him and he does not call her name.

On the screen a city burns. Or has burned. Or will burn. The tense no longer matters. A woman stands before the ashes of what was her home and she is not weeping. Her face is the face of someone who has already left. Her body remains to testify but she is gone. He recognizes that face.

The anchor speaks of statistics. Of projections. Of what officials say and what experts warn. The words wash over him like water over stone. He has heard them before. He will hear them again. Each night he sits in this chair and the screen delivers its liturgy of ruin and he receives it like a communicant who no longer believes but cannot stop kneeling.

His daughter calls from somewhere in the house. A question about homework. About tomorrow. He opens his mouth and the right sounds come out. He can still do that. The machinery of fatherhood runs on without him.

When did it leave. When did the thing inside him that could still feel the weight of the world pick up and go. He cannot find the seam. There was no moment. Only the slow discovery of absence. Like waking in a house you thought was full and walking room to room and finding no one. Finding everyone gone. Finding the coffee still warm and the beds still pressed with the shapes of bodies and no one no one no one.

The screen flickers. Another city. Another fire. Another face with no one behind it.

He watches. He does not watch. There is no difference anymore.

The shattering by saturation.

2. The Woman in the Parking Lot

She watches it on her phone in the parking lot of the grocery store. She should go inside. The milk is low and her daughter has a cold and there are things that need doing. But her thumb found the link and now she cannot move.

The man on the screen holds up his phone. He is recording. He is witnessing. This is what they told you to do. Be a witness. Document everything. The light of day is disinfectant. So he holds up his phone and the agent shoves him and he steps back but he does not stop recording.

She knows what is coming. She has read the headline. She could stop watching. Her thumb does not move.

The woman goes down. The man steps forward. Not toward the agents. Toward the woman. Because that is what you do. Because someone is on the ground and you help them up. Because this is still the world where that matters.

The spray hits him. She watches him take it. Watches him keep standing. Then they are on him. One two three four more. Seven men on one man who held a phone and tried to help a woman to her feet.

She watches the arm reach down. Watches it come up with something dark. Watches the man on the ground become a man without what he was legally permitted to carry but never held. Watches the half-second between disarming and the first shot.

Then the volley. Ten more. Into a man already down. Into a man who came to watch. Who came to witness. Whose phone recorded the sky and then the pavement and then nothing.

She sits in the parking lot. The milk is low. Her daughter has a cold. Inside the store the shelves are full or empty and it does not matter. Something has left her. She felt it go. Somewhere between the shove and the volley she felt the last of something drain out and she does not know its name but she knows it is not coming back.

The officials will speak. They will say gunman. They will say massacre. They will say feared for their lives. The words will come and they will be lies and the lies will not matter because the video is there and the video will not matter either.

She closes her eyes. The image stays.

This is the new world. She does not know how to live in it. She does not know if she is still inside her own body or if she too has fled.

The parking lot. The phone dark in her hand. The milk low at home. The daughter waiting.

She does not move.

The shattering by witness.

3. The Mother and Daughter

She shows the video to her mother. Holds the phone across the kitchen table like an offering or an accusation.

Her mother watches. Her face does not change. When it is over she hands the phone back and returns to the onions she was cutting.

Mama.

I see it.

They killed him. He was just standing there. He had a phone.

Her mother nods. The knife rocks steady against the board.

They’re saying he had a gun. He didn’t have a gun. The video shows. Everyone can see.

Her mother sweeps the onions into the pot. Wipes her hands on the towel that has hung from that hook for thirty years.

You want me to be surprised.

I want you to be angry.

Her mother turns. Looks at her daughter. Forty-one years old and still asking for something she cannot give.

Baby. They shot Philando in his car with his girl and her child watching. They shot Tamir in two seconds. A child. They shot Breonna in her bed. They shot Walter in the back and planted a gun on camera. They knelt on George for nine minutes and we watched him call for his mother.

I know.

Do you.

The kitchen is quiet. The pot simmers. Outside the window the city goes on.

They had videos then too. Her mother’s voice is not angry. That is the worst part. They had witnesses. They had uprisings. They had promises. And here we are. Same pot. Same stove. Same onions. Same news.

This feels different.

It always feels different. Her mother sits down across from her. Takes her hand. Her palm is warm and rough and smells of garlic.

I’m not saying don’t grieve. Grieve. I’m not saying don’t fight. Fight. But don’t ask me to be shocked. Don’t hand me your phone like you just discovered the fire. Baby we have been burning. We have been burning so long we learned to cook in the flames.

The daughter looks at her mother. Sees the years. The names. The videos watched and marches walked and votes cast and laws passed and bodies still falling still falling still falling.

What do we do.

What we always do. We bury who we can. We raise who we can. We keep the pot on the stove.

And the soul. What about the soul.

Her mother is quiet for a long time.

You learn to call it back. Every night. You learn to call it back or you learn to live without it. Some do one. Some do the other. Most do both.

She squeezes her daughter’s hand. Returns to the stove.

Now. You staying for dinner or not.

The shattering that never stopped.

4. The Young ICE Recruit

He joined because his mother needed the surgery and the benefits were good.

That is the truth. There were other reasons he told himself. Service. Order. The line between chaos and safety that someone has to hold. But underneath all of it his mother’s hands shook when she held a cup and the doctor used words like degenerative and progressive and the plan he was on at the warehouse didn’t cover it.

Six months of training. He was good at the tests. Good at the drills. He liked the way the uniform felt. Liked belonging to something larger than the warehouse and the apartment and the night shifts watching his mother sleep in the blue light of the television.

They told him what he would be doing. Enforcement. Removal. Words that meant taking people from one place and putting them in another. He did not think too hard about the people. He thought about the surgery. About his mother’s hands steady again. About the word degenerative and how money was the only thing that could answer it.

Minneapolis was his third operation. He stood on the perimeter. He was always on the perimeter. Watching the watchers. The ones with their phones out. The ones with their whistles and their signs and their faces full of something he could not look at directly.

He saw the man with the phone. Saw him recording. Saw Denton shove him. He knew Denton. Denton liked the work in a way that made the back of his neck cold.

He saw the woman go down. Saw the man step toward her. Toward. Not away. The wrong direction. The direction that closes distance. That is what they trained for. Distance. Compliance. The mathematics of threat.

Then the spray. The swarm. He was moving before he knew he was moving. Seven of them on one. He was the seventh. Or the sixth. He does not know. He was there and his hands were on a man who was on the ground and he could feel the man’s back heaving under his palms and someone was yelling and then the sound.

The sound.

He did not see who fired first. He was looking at his own hands. He was looking at the man’s shirt. Blue. The man’s shirt was blue and then it was not.

They pulled him back. Someone pulled him back. He stood and his hands were shaking the way his mother’s hands shake and he thought that is not right. That is her disease not mine. But they kept shaking.

The man on the ground was not moving. Around him the others were already talking. Already constructing. He heard the words. Brandishing. Threatened. Feared for our lives.

He looked at his hands.

On the ride back no one spoke to him. That was normal. He was new. But the silence felt different. The silence felt like a room with a door that had just locked behind him.

That night he called his mother. She asked about his day. He said fine. She said the doctors were optimistic. She said the surgery was scheduled. She said I’m so proud of you.

He closed his eyes.

He did not tell her about the shirt. How it was blue and then it was not. How the man’s back heaved under his palms and then stopped heaving.

She asked if he was eating enough. She asked if he was getting sleep.

He said yes. He said yes.

After he hung up he sat in the dark of his efficiency apartment and he waited for something to come. Tears. Rage. The thing that would make him human. Make him the man who would quit. Who would testify. Who would become the break in the wall.

Nothing came.

He sat there and nothing came and that was the worst part. That was the part he would carry. Not what he did. What he did not feel while he was doing it. How easy it was to become the hand on the back. How quiet the crossing. How ordinary the way the door locks behind you and you do not even hear it click.

His mother’s surgery is in three weeks.

He will not miss it.

The shattering of the one who shatters others.

II. THE WANDERING

The hollow time. The soul is gone and the body keeps moving.

5. The Drifter

She left on a Tuesday. No one remembers what the weather was.

She had a desk and a login and a coffee mug with her name on it. She had a boyfriend who texted her what do you want for dinner and she read it and put the phone in her purse and walked out of the building and did not go back.

That was eleven months ago. Or thirteen. She has stopped counting.

The bus pulls into a station that looks like every other station. Gray benches. Gray walls. A woman mopping a floor that will never be clean. She takes her bag and steps off and stands in the parking lot and picks a direction.

She eats at a diner. Eggs. Toast. Coffee in a cup that has been washed ten thousand times. The waitress calls her hon. Everyone calls her hon or sweetheart or darlin. Words that require no name.

She had a name. She has a name. She does not use it.

After the diner she walks. Main street. Dollar General. Vape shop. Laundromat. Pawn shop. Church. Bar. Parking lot. Field. The architecture of anywhere. She has seen it in forty towns and she will see it in forty more.

A man at the bus station asked her once where she was headed. She said a word. She does not remember which word. It did not matter. The word was just a sound to make the question stop.

At night she finds a place. A shelter if there is one. A motel if she has cash. A bus station bench if she has neither. She does not sleep so much as absent herself. The hours pass. Her body waits for morning. The thing that used to dream has gone elsewhere.

She calls her mother sometimes. Not often. Her mother asks when she is coming home. She says soon. The word means nothing. It is a sound to make the question stop.

She remembers the apartment. The boyfriend. The desk. She remembers them the way you remember a movie you saw as a child. The details are soft. The feeling is gone. Someone else lived that life. Someone who looked like her and used her name and thought the thoughts she was supposed to think.

That person stood up from a desk and walked out and somewhere between the door and the parking lot she just stopped existing.

What walks now is something else. Something that looks like a woman and eats eggs and rides buses and says words when words are required. Something that moves because moving is what it does. A body following a soul that is always one town ahead. Or one town behind. Or nowhere at all.

She does not know what she is looking for. She is not looking. Looking requires a self that wants something.

She is just moving.

The towns go by. The stations. The diners. The waitresses who call her hon.

Somewhere behind her there is a desk with her name on a mug. Somewhere there is a man who stopped texting. Somewhere there is a mother who has stopped asking when.

She does not think about them. Thinking is a room she does not enter.

The road unspools. The window holds the land and lets it go.

She watches. She does not watch.

There is no difference anymore.

Wandering as motion without destination.

6. The Man at the Window

He has a view of the park from the forty-second floor.

There is a report on his desk. He commissioned it privately. Asked a simple question. How long.

He has read the answer four times.

His daughter is eleven. She wants to be a marine biologist. There is a poster of a coral reef on her wall. He stood in her doorway last week and looked at it and could not breathe.

The trades are good. The algorithms do not know what he knows. They see patterns not endings.

He thinks about his father. A teacher in Ohio. Graded papers at the kitchen table. Drove a Corolla until it died. Believed the future was a thing you could hand to your children.

The phone buzzes. He does not look at it.

He should sell everything. Move somewhere. Build something. Warn someone. He does none of these things. He stands at the window and holds a glass that cost more than his father made in a week and watches joggers circle the reservoir.

They do not know. He did not know. Now he knows and the knowing changes nothing.

The numbers climb.

His daughter’s birthday is Saturday. She wants a trip to the aquarium. He will take her. He will watch her press her face to the glass and point at things that are dying and he will say yes and wow and look at that one.

He will not tell her.

He will not tell anyone.

There is nothing to say that the silence does not already hold.

The park is green. The sky is blue. The air on the forty-second floor is climate-controlled and perfectly still.

He stands at the window.

He does not move.

Wandering as stillness without hope.

7. The Boy and His Mother

The boy knows which dumpsters get emptied on which days.

He is nine. He knows things a nine-year-old should not know. Which shelter has beds on Tuesdays. Which church gives sandwiches without the sermon first. Which cops will move you along and which ones look the other way.

His mother does the best she can. He knows this without being told. He watches her stand in lines. Fill out forms. Dial numbers on a phone with a cracked screen. Her voice changes when she talks to the people behind the desks. It goes higher. Softer. Please and thank you and yes ma’am and I understand.

At night she curls around him in the tent. Her body a wall between him and the cold and whatever else moves in the dark. He feels her breathing. Sometimes it catches. Sometimes her chest shakes without sound. He pretends to be asleep.

He had a room once. He remembers a carpet. A window with a tree outside. A drawer where he kept things. He does not remember what things. The room belongs to someone else now. A boy who looks like him but lives in a place that stays.

School is hard. Not the work. The work is easy. The other kids are hard. They smell things. They know things. They have parents who pick them up in cars. He waits until they leave and then he walks in the direction his mother told him.

She says it is temporary. She says they are going to get back on their feet. He does not know what this means. They have feet. They walk on them all day.

There is a man who comes around. He gives out socks and protein bars and he knows the boy’s name. The boy does not know how the man learned it. The man asks how he is doing. The boy says fine. The word is a door that closes.

He does not feel lost. This is the thing no one understands. He does not feel found either. He does not feel like anything. The world is a series of problems and he solves them. Where to sleep. What to eat. How to keep his shoes dry when it rains. Each day is a test and he passes it and then there is another one.

His mother talks about when. When we get the voucher. When the check comes. When the apartment opens up. When is a place they are always walking toward. He has learned not to see it. Seeing it makes the walking harder.

At night he looks at the sky. The city eats most of the stars but some get through. He does not wish on them. Wishing is for boys with rooms and drawers and carpets.

He just looks.

His mother’s arm tightens around him. Her breath catches and releases.

He closes his eyes.

Tomorrow there will be problems. He will solve them.

This is what he knows. This is all he knows.

It will have to be enough.

Wandering as the only world you’ve ever known.

III. THE SEEKING

The turn. Something breaks the trance.

8. The Man on the Freeway

He has been on this freeway ten thousand times. The 10 eastbound. Five lanes of brake lights. The slow pour of metal toward downtown.

He does not listen to music anymore. He does not listen to podcasts. He sits in the silence of his car and watches the bumper ahead of him and moves when it moves and stops when it stops.

His blinker has been on for half a mile. The lane he needs is full. No one looks at him. No one ever looks. You do not look at other drivers. This is the rule. Eyes ahead. Hands on the wheel. The distance between you and the next car is the only relationship that matters.

He is late for nothing. There is no one waiting. The apartment will be as he left it. The dishes in the sink. The mail on the counter. The silence that greets him like a wife who has given up asking where he’s been.

A gap opens. He does not take it. He has learned not to hope for gaps. They close before you can reach them. The freeway teaches you this. Everyone is trying to get somewhere. No one is trying to help you get there.

Then.

A woman in a gray sedan. She sees his blinker. She sees him.

She slows. She flashes her lights. She waves him in.

He does not move. He does not understand.

She waves again. A small gesture. Her hand lifting from the wheel and opening toward him. Go ahead.

He merges. He raises his hand. The thank-you that drivers give. She nods. She is already looking ahead again. It is nothing to her. She has already forgotten.

He has not forgotten.

He drives the next three miles with something in his chest he cannot name. It is not joy. It is not grief. It is the space where those things might go if he could find them.

A woman in a gray sedan let him in.

She did not have to.

The freeway does not require this. The city does not require this. The world as he understands it does not require this.

She did it anyway.

He pulls into his parking space. He turns off the engine. He sits in the dark.

Something is cracking. Something he had sealed shut. A door he did not know he had locked.

He does not open it. Not yet. He is not ready.

But he knows it is there now.

That is new.

That is enough for tonight.

The smallest gesture. The crack that lets the light in.

9. The Woman in the Garden

She has walked this path a hundred times. The loop around the park. Three miles. She does it because her doctor said to move. She does not enjoy it. She endures it.

Earbuds in. Podcast on. Someone talking about something. She does not listen. The voice is a wall between her and the silence she cannot bear.

Today the battery dies.

She keeps walking. The quiet is too loud. She reaches for her phone to check something, anything, but her hands stay at her sides. She does not know why.

The path curves past a hedge she has never noticed. Behind it a garden. She has passed it a hundred times and never seen it.

She stops.

The bees.

Dozens of them. Hundreds. Moving through the lavender. A low hum like the earth breathing.

She stands there.

She does not take a photo. She does not think about what she will tell someone later. She just stands there.

A bird calls. Then another. Then a third voice she cannot name. They are not singing for her. They are not singing for anyone. They are singing because that is what they do. Because morning came. Because the sun is warm. Because the lavender is blooming and the bees are drunk with it.

She realizes she has not heard a bird in months. Years. They were always there. She was not.

Something shifts.

Not in the world. In her.

The hum enters her chest. The song enters her ears. For one moment she is not separate from it. For one moment she is not the woman with the dead marriage and the job that means nothing and the apartment that holds her like a drawer holds a spoon. For one moment she is just a creature standing in the sun. Breathing. Hearing. Alive in the way the bees are alive. Without reason. Without purpose. Simply here.

The moment passes.

She walks on. The loop is not finished.

But she takes the earbuds out. She puts them in her pocket.

She listens to the world make its ordinary noise. Traffic in the distance. A dog barking. Wind through the palms.

Underneath it, still, the hum.

She can hear it now.

She cannot unhear it.

The unstoppable gentle life force.

IV. THE CALLING

The turn toward what was lost. Signs, not answers.

10. The Pull

He wakes with a word in his mouth. A name. He does not know anyone by that name.

He goes to work. He comes home. The name stays.

It is not a woman’s name or a man’s name. It is a place. He looks it up. A town in New Mexico. Population four hundred. He has never been to New Mexico.

He closes the browser. He makes dinner. He eats standing at the counter the way he always does.

The name is still there.

A week passes. He finds himself looking at maps. The highways that lead there. The hours it would take. He does not own a car. He has not driven in years.

This is foolish. He knows it is foolish. A word in a dream. A town full of strangers. There is no reason.

But reason is what got him here. Reason is the apartment and the silence and the life that looks like a life but holds nothing.

He calls his sister. They have not spoken in months. She asks if he is okay. He says yes. He asks if she remembers their grandmother’s stories. The ones about where the family came from before Chicago. Before Detroit.

She is quiet for a long time.

New Mexico, she says. A town near the border. I don’t remember the name.

He tells her the name.

She is quiet again.

That’s it, she says. That’s the one. How did you know.

He does not answer. He does not know.

After he hangs up he sits in the dark for a long time.

The pull does not explain itself. It does not promise anything. It only says: here. This direction. This way.

He is not ready.

But he has stopped pretending he won’t go.

The calling as summons.

11. The Signs

Three crows on the wire outside her window. She has never noticed crows before. Now she sees them everywhere.

She is not superstitious. She does not believe in omens. She believes in data. In patterns that can be measured. In the way the world works when you strip away the stories.

But the crows keep appearing. Three of them. Always three.

She mentions it to no one. It would sound crazy. She is not crazy. She is a woman who walks a loop around the park and listens to the bees and has begun to hear things she did not hear before.

A book falls off a shelf in the bookstore. She picks it up. The cover is a photograph of a desert. The title is a question she has been asking herself for months.

She puts it back.

It falls again.

She buys the book. She does not read it. It sits on her nightstand like a dare.

Her mother calls. They talk about nothing. At the end her mother says, out of nowhere, you should visit. Come home. There’s something I want to give you.

What is it.

Her mother pauses. I don’t know yet. But it’s yours.

She hangs up. She looks at the book on the nightstand. She looks out the window at the wire where the crows are not sitting but will sit again tomorrow.

The world is saying something. She does not speak the language. But she is learning.

She is learning to listen.

She does not know what she will hear.

The calling as the world reaching back.

V. THE RETURN

Integration. The soul comes home. Changed.

(Not yet written.)

Structure:

∙ 4 pieces: The Shattering

∙ 3 pieces: The Wandering

∙ 2 pieces: The Seeking

∙ 2 pieces: The Calling

∙ 0 pieces: The Return

Total: 11 pieces across 4 movements. One movement remains.

Where next?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​