about how when I arrived home, we paused slightly in the car park at the sight of a young man with a beer can in one hand and warm May-night-snow shovel in the other. Who disappeared shortly after I popped out of the car door and shuffled shifting for keys. Maybe I should call the police about some odd boy hanging around parked cars at night with a dull heavy object meant, my tragic mind of terror thought, for no possible good. I just went inside, instead, and fumbled for a bit with my red wine tongue against teeth about not having the right set of keys to check the mail. I turned on the light inside, accidentally, intending as decided in the hallway, to watch window-ward the strange shovel-headed disaster meant to follow. Flipped it off with a swear word and perched. Creaked window crack open and cursed the clunking fan.

There was a whir like fireworks flowers in July. A green buzz that hit and smoked and fell. Suddenly the shovel turned itself into three shrieking boys completed arms with axe and gun. Determined to kill whatever it was they'd apparently just shot. I've never seen a thing shot before. And it writhed on the ground as they screamed like 12 year olds with a new toy -- 'get it with the shovel!' 'hold it down' 'don't shoot while I'm over here' -- but the kid with the axe couldn't wait. And hushed the crowd as he lopped off the dying opossum's head without permission in between the shrubbery trees between my building and the house to which they must have belonged.

Grown men, these, I thought to myself. As electric blankets of nausea seeped from an aching spot on the bottom of my spine to the deep insides of my nose. Worse spaces than this exist than drunken felled sewer animals in a parking lot at night. It's only that we don't see them. Or choose not to for ourselves. The devastation we wreck, sometimes, in lives outside our own and never contemplate is one of the worst kinds of violence I can name.