Close to Home

Tonight reporters snap poker faces into place,the latest headlines dealt in voices neutral as their suitsof beige and tweed. Tragedy, they tell you,is your next-door neighbor waiting to happen.You don't want to believe them,even when they shuffle you from the local manauthorities found hours ago, polishingthe still-smoking rifle he unloadedinto his mother's body, to the teenage girl, shyof her senior year, caught pressinga blanket's bundled cries down the belly of a dumpster,afterbirth slicking her thighs like garters.All of this you watch safely from the dim cellof your living room, unwavering as a glacier,television static draping the walls. Try not to thinkabout impulses or desires, the plans wageredbehind the shaded windows roping your oak-lined street.Otherwise, you might bet the grandmotherat the corner market, the one who sifts the cellarof her purse for last-minute coupons,is the same woman police dragged from her home,cameras swiveling lascivious eyes over the bleached bonesof three men stacked in her backyard.But isn't that how it begins? Add up the secondsyou exhaust in fear, the days you spendwith your gaze pressed between the slitsof narrowed blinds, slick palms securing locksin every room, your spine plucked by the persistent noteof advancing steps. Soon, nothing will surprise you,not even the blue lights that finally spiral past rowsof trimmed hedges knuckling a driveway two doorsdown, a familiar face pale in the back seat. The same face that will peer up at youfrom a grainy photo in tomorrow's paper:a father, the frail stems of three girls swayinglike sunflowers at his knees, their now motherless facestilted skyward, beseeching, innocentbeneath their blurred whorls of shadow.